A Novel Cache Replacement Policy for Web Proxy Caching System Using Web Usage Mining

Abstract

Network congestion remains one of the main barriers to the continuing success of the internet and Web based services. In this background, proxy caching is one of the most successful solutions for civilizing the performance of Web since it reduce network traffic, Web server load and improves user perceived response time. Here, the most popular Web objects that are likely to be revisited in the near future are stored in the proxy server thereby it improves the Web response time and saves network bandwidth. The main component of Web caching is it cache replacement policy. It plays a key role in replacing existing objects when there is no room for new one especially when cache is full. Moreover, the conventional replacement policies are used in Web caching environments which provide poor network performance. These policies are suitable for memory caching since it involves fixed sized objects. But, Web caching which involves objects of varying size and hence there is a need for an efficient policy that works better in Web cache environment. Moreover, most of the existing Web caching policies have considered few factors and ignored the factors that have impact on the efficiency of Web proxy caching. Hence, it is decided to propose a novel policy for Web cache environment. The proposed policy includes size, cost, frequency, ageing, time of entry into the cache and popularity of Web objects in cache removal policy. It uses the Web usage mining as a technique to improve Web caching policy. Also, empirical analyses shows that proposed policy performs better than existing policies in terms of various performance metrics such as hit rate and byte hit rate.