Adaptive web caching: towards a new global caching architecture

An adaptive, highly scalable, and robust web caching system is needed to ef fectively handle the exponential growth and extreme dynamic environment of the World Wide Web. Our work presented last year sketched out the basic des ign of such a system. This sequel paper reports our progress over the past year. To assist caches making web query forwarding decisions, we sketch out the basic design of a URL routing framework. To assist fast searching with in each cache group, we let neighbor caches share content information. Equi pped with the URL routing table and neighbor cache contents, a cache in the revised design can now search the local group, and forward all missing que ries quickly and efficiently, thus eliminating both the waiting delay and t he overhead associated with multicast queries. The paper also presents a pr oposal for incremental deployment that provides a smooth transition from th e currently deployed cache infrastructure to the new design. (C) 1998 Publi shed by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.