ADJUSTING WEB CACHING COMPUTERS TO REDUCE COMMUNICATION CHANNEL ALLOCATION

On the Internet, it is common practice to use a computer to provide web caching services. Such services aim to reduce network utilization and improve access time to a web page. Limited storage space and performance requirements, however, restrict the number of objects a web cache can store. The need to access new objects requires replacement of cached ones. Such replacement decisions may affect users response time and communication channel allocation time. While many research studies focus on the availability of the objects, this paper addresses the problem of reducing the load of communication channels. This study discusses mechanisms used in Web caching and suggests an algorithm based on a time distance metric that should be considered with other cache management algorithms to provide the necessary relief to the communication system. Simulated experiments support the proposed algorithm, showing significant reductions of the average access time to web objects.