Stationary Distribution of a Generalized LRU-MRU Content Cache

Abstract

Many different caching mechanisms have been previously proposed, exploring different insertion and eviction policies and their performance individually and as part of caching networks. We obtain a novel closed-form stationary invariant distribution for a generalization of Least Recently Used (LRU) and Most Recently Used (MRU) eviction for single caching nodes under a reference Markov model. Numerical comparisons are made with an “Incremental Rank Progress” (IRP a.k.a. CLIMB) and random eviction (RE a.k.a. random replacement, RANDOM) methods under a steady-state Zipf popularity distribution. The range of cache hit probabilities is smaller under MRU and larger under IRP compared to LRU. We conclude with the invariant distribution for a special case of a RE caching tree-network.