An expiration age-based document placement scheme for cooperative Web caching

The sharing of caches among proxies is an important technique to reduce Web traffic, alleviate network bottlenecks, and improve response time of document requests. Most existing work on cooperative caching has been focused on serving misses collaboratively. Very few have studied the effect of cooperation on document placement schemes and its potential enhancements on cache hit ratio and latency reduction. We propose a new document placement scheme which takes into account the contentions at individual caches in order to limit the replication of documents within a cache group and increase document hit ratio. The main idea of this new scheme is to view the aggregate disk space of the cache group as a global resource of the group and uses the concept of cache expiration age to measure the contention of individual caches. The decision of whether to cache a document at a proxy is made collectively among the caches that already have a copy of this document. We refer to this new document placement scheme as the Expiration Age-based scheme (EA scheme). The EA scheme effectively reduces the replication of documents across the cache group, while ensuring that a copy of the document always resides in a cache where it is likely to stay for the longest time. We report our study on the potentials and limits of the EA scheme using both analytic modeling and trace-based simulation. The analytical model compares and contrasts the existing (ad hoc) placement scheme of cooperative proxy caches with our new EA scheme and indicates that the EA scheme improves the effectiveness of aggregate disk usage, thereby increasing the average time duration for which documents stay in the cache. The trace-based simulations show that the EA scheme yields higher hit rates and better response times compared to the existing document placement schemes used in most of the caching proxies.