Evaluation of the number of destination hosts for data networking and its application to address cache design

This paper discuses how to design the capacity of address cache tables for large-scale computer communication networks. We show that destination addresses of packets can, be assumed to be characterized by two types of Zipf's law. Based on the complementary use of these laws, we derive the relation between the number of accesses and the number of destination addresses. Experimental results show that the relation gives a good approximation. Applying this relation, we derive the upper/lower bounds for cache hit probability. Using the probabilities, design issues including the capacity of the cache table and aging algorithm of cache entries are also discussed.