Least-recently-used caching with dependent requests

Abstract

We investigate a widely popular least-recently-used (LRU) cache replacement algorithm with semi-Markov modulated requests. Semi-Markov processes provide the flexibility for modeling strong statistical correlation, including the widely reported long-range dependence in the World Wide Web page request patterns. When the frequency of requesting a page n is equal to the generalized Zipf's law c / n α , α > 1 , our main result shows that the cache fault probability is asymptotically, for large cache sizes, the same as in the corresponding LRU system with i.i.d. requests. The result is asymptotically explicit and appears to be the first computationally tractable average-case analysis of LRU caching with statistically dependent request sequences. The surprising insensitivity of LRU caching performance demonstrates its robustness to changes in document popularity. Furthermore, we show that the derived asymptotic result and simulation experiments are in excellent agreement, even for relatively small cache sizes.