The phenomenal growth of the world wide web has made it the most popular Internet application today. Web proxy caching is an important vehicle to mitigate web traffic explosion. Current web caching services are becoming increasingly inefficient for two reasons. First, the continuous increase in dynamically generated content makes an increasing fraction of web-based media uncacheable. Second, the increasing diversity of web traffic requires a QoS-aware caching infrastructure while the current caches are best-effort.
In this project we shall design, implement and evaluate an active caching/replication architecture that resolves the aforementioned major limitations. The service augments web caches with the ability to replicate not only static data but also data sources in a demand-driven QoS-sensitive fashion. The cache acts as a QoS-aware retailer that imports whatever active content is in local demand at the current time. Demand-driven data source replication allows dynamic content to be generated on the cache. Hence, it shifts the need for computing power from centralized origin servers to proxies in the vicinity of end-users thereby improving scalability and allowing cache-assisted customization of user-perceived information access performance. By offering data source location as a dimension to manipulate, the architecture achieves better solutions for the web performance optimization problem that are well-suited to diverse end-user needs.
