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Evolving En-Route Caching Strategies for the Internet
Jürgen Branke1, Pablo Funes2, and Frederik Thiele1
1Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany
branke@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
2Icosystem Corp., 10 Fawcett ST. Cambridge MA 02138 USA
pablo@icosystem.com
Abstract. Nowadays, large distributed databases are commonplace. Client applications increasingly rely on accessing objects from multiple remote hosts. The Internet itself is a huge network of computers, sending documents point-to-point by routing packetized data over multiple intermediate relays. As hubs in the network become overutilized, slowdowns and timeouts can disrupt the process. It is thus worth to think about ways to minimize these effects. Caching, i.e. storing replicas of previously-seen objects for later reuse, has the potential for generating large bandwidth savings and in turn a significant decrease in response time.
En-route caching is the concept that all nodes in a network are equipped with a cache, and may opt to keep copies of some documents for future reuse [18]. The rules used for such decisions are called “caching strategies”. Designing such strategies is a challenging task, because the different nodes interact, resulting in a complex, dynamic system. In this paper, we use genetic programming to evolve good caching strategies, both for specific networks and network classes. An important result is a new innovative caching strategy that outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.
LNCS 3103, p. 434 ff.
lncs@springer.de
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004