Abstract | The efficient delivery of web content has been identified
as a key issue of research for some time. Forward (or
reverse) proxies, which are positioned along the request
route from the users' browsers to the origin content servers,
maintain a cache with copies of content from their origin
servers. The strategic placement of proxies across the
backbone ISP or the Content Delivery Network can
drastically improve the performance of the system (in terms
of network bandwidth savings, origin server load, and
user-request latency).
The ultimate goal of this work is to develop a tool that
decides on the position and the number of proxies required
in order to achieve given performance improvements
(expressed in terms of network bandwidth, origin server
load, and user-latency). We believe such a tool will be very
helpful to ISPs/CDNs, content providers, and end-users
and is, thus, very much lacking. |