Distributed Proxy Server Management: A Self-Organized Approach

Proxy servers are common solutions to relieve organizational networks from heavy traffic by storing the most frequently referenced web objects in their local cache. These proxies are commonly known as cooperative proxy systems and are usually organized in such a way as to optimize the utilization of their storage capacity. A self-organized approach to manage a distributed proxy system called Adaptive Distributed Caching (ADC) is proposed. We model each proxy as an autonomous agent that is equipped to decide how to deal with client requests using local information. Experimental results show that our ADC algorithm is able to compete with typical hashing-based approaches. This paper gives a full description of the self-organizing distributed algorithm, with a performance comparison based on hit rate and hop count. Additional evaluation of the performance with respect to the request routing table size is also presented.