Evaluating Cooperative Web Caching for Emerging Network Technologies

While bandwidth for previous IP backbone networks deployed by Internet Service Providers typically has been limited to 34 Mbps, current and future IP networks provide bandwidth ranging from 155 Mbps to 2.4 Gbps. Thus, due to emerging network technologies cooperative Web caching among institutional proxy caches residing a wide area backbone network shows great promise to become an effective approach for reducing Web document access latencies in the global Internet. In this paper, we present a comprehensive performance study of four cooperative Web caching protocols. We consider the Internet cache protocol ICP, Cache Digests, the cache array routing protocol, CARP, and the Web cache coordination protocol, WCCP. The performance results are derived using trace-driven simulation. In particular, the effect of rapidly increasing bandwidth availability due to emerging network technologies on the performance achieved by these protocols is investigated. The presented results show that hash based protocols such as CARP and WCCP can effectively support cooperative web caching in high-speed backbone networks.