Virtual Clusters for Web Caches Using Active Networks

摘要

Web caching technology is now commonly used to reduce the response time and save the bandwidth for hot web accesses. The performance can be improved by clustering several caches together, where a dispatcher is adopted to select suitable caches from the cache cluster for requests. Therefore, appropriately configure the cache cluster and design the dispatching scheme become important issues. Distributed dispatchers using the active networking technology is proposed in the paper to dispatch requests to appropriate caches, according to network conditions and cache loads. Virtual clustering is also proposed in the paper to balance the loads of caches globally on the networks. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes can improve the standard deviation of cache loads for at most 78%, reduce average response time for 41% and decrease the dispatching miss for 74% compared with the round robin DNS solution.