A new protocol for efficient cooperative transversal web caching

Abstract

The bandwidth demands on the World Wide Web continue to grow at an exponential rate. To address this problem, many research activities are focusing on the design of Web caches. Unfortunately, Web caches exhibit poor performance with a hit rate of about 30%. A solution to improve this rate, consists of groups of cooperating caches. In its most general form, a cooperative cache system includes protocols for hierarchical and transversal caching. Although such a system brings better performance, its drawback lies in the resulting network load due to the number of messages that need to be exchanged to locate an object. This paper introduces a new protocol for transversal cooperative caching, which significantly reduces the associated network load compared to that induced by existing systems.