A unifying co‐operative web caching architecture

Network caching of objects has become a standard way of reducing network traffic and latency in the web. However, web caches exhibit poor performance with a hit rate of about 30%. A solution to improve this hit rate is to have a group of proxies form co‐operation where objects can be cached for later retrieval. A co‐operative cache system includes protocols for hierarchical and transversal caching. The drawback of such a system lies in the resulting network load due to the number of messages that need to be exchanged to locate an object. This paper proposes a new co‐operative web caching architecture, which unifies previous methods of web caching. Performance results shows that the architecture achieve up to 70% co‐operative hit rate and accesses the cached object in at most two hops. Moreover, the architecture is scalable with low traffic and database overhead. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.