Self-Organizing Wide-Area Network Caches

A substantial fraction of all network tra c today comes from applications in which clients retrieve objects from servers. The caching of objects in locations \close" to clients is an important technique for reducing both network tra c and response time for such applications. In this paper we consider the bene ts of associating caches with switching nodes throughout the network, rather than in a few locations. We also consider the use of various self-organizing or active cache management strategies for organizing cache content. We evaluate caching techniques using both simulation and a general analytic model for network caching. Our results indicate that in-network caching can make e ective use of cache space, and in many cases self-organizing caching schemes yield better average round-trip latencies than traditional approaches, using much smaller per-node caches.