Distributed caching with centralized control

  • Authors:

  • S Paul;Z Fei

  • Affiliations:

  • Edgix Corporation, New York, NY 10036, USA;Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA

  • Venue:
  • Computer Communications
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

The benefits of using caches for reducing traffic in backbone trunk links and for improving web access times are well-known. However, there are some known problems with traditional web caching, namely, maintaining freshness of web objects, balancing load among a number of caches and providing protection against cache failure. This paper investigates in detail the advantages and disadvantages of a distributed architecture of caches which are coordinated through a central controller. In particular, the performance of a set of independent caches is compared against the performance of a set of coordinated distributed caches using extensive simulation. The conclusion is that a distributed architecture of coordinated caches consistently provides a better hit ratio, improves response time, provides better freshness, achieves load balancing, and increases the overall traffic handling capacity of a network while paying a small price in terms of additional control traffic. In particular, we have observed up to 40% improvement in hit ratio, 70% improvement in response time, 60% improvement in freshness and 25% improvement in traffic handling capacity of a network with caches.