WORLD-WIDE-WEB CACHING - THE APPLICATION-LEVEL VIEW OF THE INTERNET

The Internet has fallen prey to its most successful service, the World Wide Web. The networks do not keep up with the demands incurred by th e huge amount of Web surfers. Thus, it takes longer and longer to obta in the information one wants to access via the World Wide Web. Many so lutions to the problem of network congestion have been developed in di stributed systems research in general and distributed file and databas e systems in particular. The introduction of caching and replication s trategies has proven to help in many situations; therefore, these tech niques are also applied to the Web. Although most problems and associa ted solutions are known, some circumstances are different with the Web , forcing the adaptation of known strategies. This article gives an ov erview about these differences and about currently deployed, developed , and evaluated solutions.