Development of a Distributed Web Caching Network through Consistent Hashing and Dynamic Load Balancing

This paper focuses on a hash-based, distributed Wet caching network that eliminates inter-cache communication. An agent program on cache servers, a mapping program on the DNS server, and other components comprised in a distributed Web caching network were modified and developed to implement a so-called "consistent" hashing. Also, a dynamic load balancing algorithm is proposed to address the load-balancing problem that is a key performance issue on distributed architectures. This algorithm effectively balances the load among cache servers by distributing the calculated amount of mapping items that have higher popularity than others. Therefore, this developed network can resolve the imbalanced load that is caused by a variable page popularity, a non-uniform distribution of a hash-based mapping, and a variation of cache servers.