Improvement to HOME based Internet caching protocol

An efficient inter-cache communication protocol is one of the key techniques to win better cache performance. ICP (Internet caching protocol) and its extensions - CARP (cache array routing protocol) and HOME (home-based cooperative cache array protocol) - are well-known existing cache array protocols. However, ICP may cause a lot of Internet messages and could have many duplicated objects in caches, while CARP has low local hit-rate. HOME overcomes the disadvantages of ICP and CARP, but still has some drawbacks, such as lack of robustness against failure, poor scalability and load balance. To overcome these disadvantages, we implement a consistent hashing for HOME and name this new extension HOME-EX. The simulation results show that HOME-EX overcomes the drawbacks of HOME and achieves higher fault tolerance, higher scalability, and better load balance.