A New Hybrid Architecture for Cooperative Web Caching

An effective solution to the problems caused by the explosive growth of World Wide Web is a web caching that employing an additional server, called proxy cache, between the clients and main server for caching the popular web objects near the clients. However, a single proxy cache can easily become the bottleneck. Deploying groups of cooperative caches provides scalability and robustness by eliminating the limitations caused by a single proxy cache. Two common architectures to implement the cooperative caching are hierarchical and distributed caching systems. Unfortunately, both architectures suffer from performance limitations. We propose an efficient hybrid caching architecture eliminating these limitations by using both the hierarchical and same level caches. Our performance evaluation with our investigated simulator shows that the proposed architecture offers the best of both existing architectures in terms of cache hit rate, the number of query messages from clients, and response time.