Exploiting client caches: an approach to building large Web caches

New demands brought by the continuing growth of the Internet will be met in part by more effective and comprehensive use of caching. We propose to exploit client browser caches in cooperative proxy caching by constructing the client caches within each organization (e.g., corporate networks) as a large peer-to-peer client cache. Via trace-driven simulations we evaluate the potential performance benefit of cooperative proxy caching with/without exploiting client caches. We show that exploiting client caches in cooperative proxy caching can significantly improve performance, particularly when the size of individual proxy caches is limited compared to the universe of Web objects. We further devise a cooperative hierarchical greedy-dual replacement algorithm (Hier-GD), which not only provides some cache coordination but also utilizes client caches. Through Hier-GD, we explore the design issues of how to exploit client caches in cooperative proxy caching to build large Web caches. We show that Hier-GD is technically practical and can potentially improve the performance of cooperative proxy caching by utilizing client caches