Vertical Caching: Web Caching for Challenged Networks

Many network links in developing regions are low-bandwidth or intermittent. In addition to the inherent connection constraints, web browsing over these networks is an extremely painful experience due to inappropriate cache design. A single cache miss during browsing may cause a stall on the order of minutes or even hours. To improve web cache performance, we propose a new model of web caching particularly tailored for low-bandwidth and intermittent environments called vertical caching. Vertical caching extends existing caching mechanisms based on URLs to aggregates of cached pages across topics. We show that vertical caching has the potential to dramatically improve performance in these settings.