Using network-level support to improve cache routing

We present the design of a new distributed Web caching infrastructure that uses network-level mechanisms to provide routing of Web requests to caches. Our work is motivated by the need to provide effective caching not only fo r the small number of extremely popular Web documents, but also for the lar ge number of documents of only intermediate popularity. In currently existi ng and proposed systems, requests for less popular documents suffer from lo ng latency stemming from the inefficiencies of routing through an applicati on-level overlay network. We combat this problem by integrating cache routi ng into the network layer, which results in shorter search paths and fewer application-level checks. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserve d.