On the Optimal Placement of Web Proxies in the Internet: The Linear Topology

Abstract

Web caching or web proxy has been considered as the prime vehicle to cope with the ever-increasing demand for information retrieval over the Internet, WWW being a typical example. The existing work on web proxy has primarily focused on content based caching; relatively less attention has been given to the development of proper placement strategies for the potential web proxies in the Internet. This paper investigates the optimal placement policy of web proxies for a target web server in the Internet. The objective is to minimize the overall latency of searching the target web server subject to the network resources and traffic pattern. Specifically, we are interested in finding the optimal placement of multiple web proxies (m) among the potential sites (n) under a given traffic pattern. We model the problem as a Dynamic Programming problem, and we obtain an optimal solution for a linear array topology using O(n 2 m) time.KeywordsWeb cachingProxy serverDynamic Programming