We study the problem of optimal content placement over a network of caches, a problem naturally arising in several networking applications, including ICNs, CDNs, and P2P systems. Given a demand of content request rates and paths followed, we wish to determine the content placement that maximizes the expected caching gain, i.e., the reduction of routing costs due to intermediate caching. The offline version of this problem is NP-hard and, in general, the demand and topology may be a priori unknown. Hence, a distributed, adaptive, constant approximation content placement algorithm is desired. We show that path replication, a simple algorithm frequently encountered in literature, can be arbitrarily suboptimal when combined with traditional eviction policies, like LRU, LFU, or FIFO. We propose a distributed, adaptive algorithm that performs stochastic gradient ascent on a concave relaxation of the expected caching gain, and constructs a probabilistic content placement within 1-1 e factor from the optimal, in expectation. Motivated by our analysis, we also propose a novel greedy eviction policy to be used with path replication, and show through numerical evaluations that both algorithms significantly outperform path replication with traditional eviction policies over a broad array of network topologies.
Buffer caches are commonly used in servers to reduce the number of slow disk accesses or network messages. These buffer caches form a multilevel buffer cache hierarchy. In such a hierarchy, second-level buffer caches have different access patterns from first-level buffer caches because accesses to a second-level are actually misses from a first-level. Therefore, commonly used cache management algorithms such as the least recently used (LRU) replacement algorithm that work well for single-level buffer caches may not work well for second-level. We investigate multiple approaches to effectively manage second-level buffer caches. In particular, we report our research results in 1) second-level buffer cache access pattern characterization, 2) a new local algorithm called multi-queue (MQ) that performs better than nine tested alternative algorithms for second-level buffer caches, 3) a set of global algorithms that manage a multilevel buffer cache hierarchy globally and significantly improve second-level buffer cache hit ratios over corresponding local algorithms, and 4) implementation and evaluation of these algorithms in a real storage system connected with commercial database servers (Microsoft SQL server and Oracle) running industrial-strength online transaction processing benchmarks.  This paper aims at finding fundamental design principles for hierarchical Web caching. An analytical modeling technique is developed to characterize an uncooperative two-level hierarchical caching system where the least recently used (LRU) algorithm is locally run at each cache. With this modeling technique, we are able to identify a characteristic time for each cache, which plays a fundamental role in understanding the caching processes. In particular, a cache can be viewed roughly as a low-pass filter with its cutoff frequency equal to the inverse of the characteristic time. Documents with access frequencies lower than this cutoff frequency have good chances to pass through the cache without cache hits. This viewpoint enables us to take any branch of the cache tree as a tandem of low-pass filters at different cutoff frequencies, which further results in the finding of two fundamental design principles. Finally, to demonstrate how to use the principles to guide the caching algorithm design, we propose a cooperative hierarchical Web caching architecture based on these principles. Both model-based and real trace simulation studies show that the proposed cooperative architecture results in more than 50 memory saving and substantial central processing unit (CPU) power saving for the management and update of cache entries compared with the traditional uncooperative hierarchical caching architecture. We propose a novel search mechanism for unstructured p2p networks, and show that it is both scalable, i.e., it leads to a bounded query traffic load per peer as the peer population grows, and reliable, i.e., it successfully locates all files that are (sufficiently often) brought into the system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a search mechanism for unstructured p2p networks has been shown to be both scalable and reliable. We provide both a formal analysis and a numerical case study to illustrate this result. Our analysis is based on a random graph model for the overlay graph topology and uses a mean-field approximation to characterize the evolution of how files are replicated in the network. Many researchers have been working on the performance analysis of caching in Information-Centric Networks (ICNs) under various replacement policies like Least Recently Used (LRU), FIFO or Random (RND). However, no exact results are provided, and many approximate models do not scale even for the simple network of two caches connected in tandem. In this paper, we introduce a Time-To-Live based policy (TTL), that assigns a timer to each content stored in the cache and redraws the timer each time the content is requested (at each hit miss). We show that our TTL policy is more general than LRU, FIFO or RND, since it is able to mimic their behavior under an appropriate choice of its parameters. Moreover, the analysis of networks of TTL-based caches appears simpler not only under the Independent Reference Model (IRM, on which many existing results rely) but also with the Renewal Model for requests. In particular, we determine exact formulas for the performance metrics of interest for a linear network and a tree network with one root cache and N leaf caches. For more general networks, we propose an approximate solution with the relative errors smaller than 10−3 and 10−2 for exponentially distributed and constant TTLs respectively. Content-centric networking proposals, as Parc's CCN, have recently emerged to define new network architectures where content, and not its location, becomes the core of the communication model. These new paradigms push data storage and delivery at network layer and are designed to better deal with current Internet usage, mainly centered around content dissemination and retrieval. In this paper, we develop an analytical model of CCN in-network storage and receiver-driven transport, that more generally applies to a class of content ori ented networks identified by chunk-based communication. We derive a closed-form expression for the mean stationary throughput as a function of hit miss probabilities at the caches along the path, of content popularity and of content cache size. Our analytical results, supported by chunk level simulations, can be used to analyze fundamental trade-offs in current CCN architecture, and provide an essential building block for the design and evaluation of enhanced CCN protocols. Over the past few years Content-Centric Networking, a networking model in which host-to-content communication protocols are introduced, has been gaining much attention. A central component of such an architecture is a large-scale interconnected caching system. To date, the way these Cache Networks operate and perform is still poorly understood. In this work, we demonstrate that certain cache networks are non-ergodic in that their steady-state characterization depends on the initial state of the system. We then establish several important properties of cache networks, in the form of three independently-sufficient conditions for a cache network to comprise a single ergodic component. Each property targets a different aspect of the system - topology, admission control and cache replacement policies. Perhaps most importantly we demonstrate that cache replacement can be grouped into equivalence classes, such that the ergodicity (or lack-thereof) of one policy implies the same property holds for all policies in the class. The overall performance of content distribution networks as well as recently proposed information-centric networks rely on both memory and bandwidth capacities. The hit ratio is the key performance indicator which captures the bandwidth memory tradeoff for a given global performance. This paper focuses on the estimation of the hit ratio in a network of caches that employ the Random replacement policy (RND). Assuming that requests are independent and identically distributed, general expressions of miss probabilities for a single RND cache are provided as well as exact results for specific popularity distributions (such results also hold for the FIFO replacement policy). Moreover, for any Zipf popularity distribution with exponent @a>1, we obtain asymptotic equivalents for the miss probability in the case of large cache size. We extend the analysis to networks of RND caches, when the topology is either a line or a homogeneous tree. In that case, approximations for miss probabilities across the network are derived by neglecting time correlations between miss events at any node; the obtained results are compared to the same network using the Least-Recently-Used discipline, already addressed in the literature. We further analyze the case of a mixed tandem cache network where the two nodes employ either Random or Least-Recently-Used policies. In all scenarios, asymptotic formulas and approximations are extensively compared to simulation results and shown to be very accurate. Finally, our results enable us to propose recommendations for cache replacement disciplines in a network dedicated to content distribution. The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures that are most prevalent in today's Internet are decentralized and unstructured. Search is blind in that it is independent of the query and is thus not more effective than probing randomly chosen peers. One technique to improve the effectiveness of blind search is to proactively replicate data. We evaluate and compare different replication strategies and reveal interesting structure: Two very common but very different replication strategies - uniform and proportional - yield the same average performance on successful queries, and are in fact worse than any replication strategy which lies between them. The optimal strategy lies between the two and can be achieved by simple distributed algorithms. These fundamental results o.er a new understanding of replication and show that currently deployed replication strategies are far from optimal and that optimal replication is attainable by protocols that resemble existing ones in simplicity and operation. Large scale hierarchical caches for Web content have been deployed widely in an attempt to reduce delivery delays and bandwidth consumption and also to improve the scalability of content dissemination through the World Wide Web. Irrespective of the specific replacement algorithm employed in each cache, a de facto characteristic of contemporary hierarchical caches is that a hit for a document at an l-level cache leads to the caching of the document in all intermediate caches (levels l-1,..., 1) on the path towards the leaf cache that received the initial request. This paper presents various algorithms that revises this standard behavior and attempts to be more selective in choosing the caches that gets to store a local copy of the requested document. As these algorithms operate independently of the actual replacement algorithm running in each individual cache, they are referred to as meta algorithms. Three new meta algorithms are proposed and compared against the de facto one and a recently proposed one by means of synthetic and trace-driven simulations. The best of the new meta algorithms appears to be leading to improved performance under most simulated scenarios, especially under a low availability of storage. The latter observation makes the presented meta algorithms particularly favorable for the handling of large data objects such as stored music files or short video clips. Additionally, a simple load balancing algorithm that is based on the concept of meta algorithms is proposed and evaluated. The algorithm is shown to be able to provide for an effective balancing of load thus possibly addressing the recently discovered "filtering-effect" in hierarchical Web caches.  Network use has evolved to be dominated by content distribution and retrieval, while networking technology still speaks only of connections between hosts. Accessing content and services requires mapping from the what that users care about to the network's where. We present Content-Centric Networking (CCN) which treats content as a primitive - decoupling location from identity, security and access, and retrieving content by name. Using new approaches to routing named content, derived heavily from IP, we can simultaneously achieve scalability, security and performance. We implemented our architecture's basic features and demonstrate resilience and performance with secure file downloads and VoIP calls. TTL caching models have recently regained significant research interest due to their connection to popular caching policies such as LRU. This paper advances the state-of-the-art analysis of TTL-based cache networks by developing two exact methods with orthogonal generality and computational complexity. The first method generalizes existing results for line networks under renewal requests to the broad class of caching policies whereby evictions are driven by stopping times; in addition to classical policies used in DNS and web caching, our stopping time model captures an emerging new policy implemented in SDN switches and Amazon web services. The second method further generalizes these results to feedforward networks with Markov arrival process (MAP) requests. MAPs are particularly suitable for non-line networks because they are closed not only under superposition and splitting, as known, but also under caching operations with phase-type (PH) TTL distributions. The crucial benefit of the two closure properties is that they jointly enable the first exact analysis of TTL feedforward cache networks in great generality. Moreover, numerical results highlight that existing Poisson approximations in binary-tree topologies are subject to relative errors as large as 30 , depending on the tree depth. In a 2002 paper, Che and co-authors proposed a simple approach for estimating the hit rates of a cache operating the least recently used (LRU) replacement policy. The approximation proves remarkably accurate and is applicable to quite general distributions of object popularity. This paper provides a mathematical explanation for the success of the approximation, notably in configurations where the intuitive arguments of clearly do not apply. The approximation is particularly useful in evaluating the performance of current proposals for an information centric network where other approaches fail due to the very large populations of cacheable objects to be taken into account and to their complex popularity law, resulting from the mix of different content types and the filtering effect induced by the lower layers in a cache hierarchy.