Proxy Ecology - Cooperative Proxies with Artificial Life

Proxy servers have been widely used by institutions to serve their clients behind firewalls. Recently many schemes have been proposed to organize the proxy servers into a cooperative proxy cache system. However most of existing proxy cache schemes require manual configuration of the cooperative proxies based on the network architecture. In this paper, we propose a novel P2P proxy caching scheme using an individual based model. We borrow the ideas from the ecological system as well as the economical system to manage the cooperative proxies through data and information exchange among individual proxies. Data flow among the proxy nodes creates artificial life for the proxies. Proxy servers with artificial life can automatically configure themselves into a Virtual Proxy Graph. The aggregate effect of caching actions by individual peer proxies forms a proxy ecology which automatically distributes data to nearest clients and balances workload. Our simulation results show that the proposed proxy caching scheme tremendously improves system performance. In addition, the individual based design model ensures simplicity and scalability of the cache system.