Quantifying the Overall Impact of Caching and Replication in the Web

This paper discusses the benefits and drawbacks of caching and replication strategies in the WWW with respect to the Internet infrastructure. Bandwidth consumption, latency, and overall error rates are considered to be most important from a network point of view. The dependencies of these values with input parameters like degree of replication, document popularity, actual cache hit rates, and error rates are highlighted. In order to determine the influence of different caching and replication strategies on the behavior of a single proxy server with respect to these values, trace-based simulations are used. Since the overall effects of such strategies can hardly be decided with this approach alone, a mathematical model has been developed to deal with their influence on the network as a whole. Together, this two-tiered approach permits us to propose quantitative assessments on the influence different caching and replication proposals (are going to) have on the Internet infrastructure.