Bringing the Web to the Network Edge: Large Caches and Satellite Distribution

In this paper we discuss the performance of a document distribution model that interconnects Web caches through a satellite channel. During recent years Web caching has emerged as an important way to reduce client-perceived latency and network resource requirements in the Internet. Also a satellite distribution is being rapidly deployed to offer Internet services while avoiding highly congested terrestrial links. When Web caches are interconnected through a satellite distribution, caches end up containing all documents requested by a huge community of clients. Having a large community of clients connected to a cache, the probability that a client is the first one to request a document is very small, and the number of requests that are hit in the cache increases. In this paper we develop analytical models to study the performance of a cache-satellite distribution. We derive simple expressions for the hit rate of the caches, the bandwidth in the satellite channel, the latency experienced by the clients, and the required capacity of the caches. Additionally, we use trace driven simulations to validate our model and evaluate the performance of a real cache-satellite distribution.