On scalable and locality-aware web document sharing

We propose a scalable Web document sharing infrastructure model called Browsers-Aware Proxy Server. In this design, a proxy server connecting to a group of networked clients maintains an index file of data objects of all clients’ browser caches. If a user request misses in its local browser cache and the proxy cache, the browsers-aware proxy server will search the index file attempting to find it in another client’s browser cache before sending the request to an upper level proxy or the Web server. If such a request does hit in a remote client, this client will directly forward the data object to the requesting client; or the proxy server fetches the data object from this client and then forwards it to the requesting client. The contributions of this caching model are twofold. First, we show that the amount of sharable data in browser caches is significant and can be utilized for document sharing among clients to improve Web caching performance and scalability. Second, the browsers-aware model can effectively and further improve Web prefetching performance. The browsers-aware model and its supported prefetching technique build a strong locality-aware Internet environment to make Web accesses fast with low communication costs. Conducting trace-driven simulations, we show the effectiveness of the browsers-aware model, and its unique advantages to facilitate prefetching. r 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.