Maintaining Mutual Consistency for Cached Web Objects

Existing web proxy caches employ cache consistency mechanisms to ensure that locally cached data is consistent with that at the server. In this paper, we argue that techniques for maintaining consistency of individual objects are not sufficient—a proxy should employ additional mechanisms to ensure that related web objects are mutually consistent with one another. We formally define the notion of mutual consistency and the semantics provided by a mutual consistency mechanism to end-users. We then present techniques for maintaining mutual consistency in the temporal and value domains. A novel aspect of our techniques is that they can adapt to the variations in the rate of change of the source data, resulting in judicious use of proxy and network resources. We evaluate our approaches using real-world web traces and show that (i) careful tuning can result in substantial savings in the network overhead incurred without any substantial loss in fidelity of the consistency guarantees, and (ii) the incremental cost of providing mutual consistency guarantees over mechanisms to provide individual consistency guarantees is small

Distributed Selfish Coaching

Although cooperation generally increases the amount of resources available to a community of nodes, thus improving individual and collective performance, it also allows for the appearance of potential mistreatment problems through the exposition of one node's resources to others. We study such concerns by considering a group of independent, rational, self-aware nodes that cooperate using on-line caching algorithms, where the exposed resource is the storage at each node. Motivated by content networking applications -- including web caching, CDNs, and P2P -- this paper extends our previous work on the on-line version of the problem, which was conducted under a game-theoretic framework, and limited to object replication. We identify and investigate two causes of mistreatment: (1) cache state interactions (due to the cooperative servicing of requests) and (2) the adoption of a common scheme for cache management policies. Using analytic models, numerical solutions of these models, as well as simulation experiments, we show that on-line cooperation schemes using caching are fairly robust to mistreatment caused by state interactions. To appear in a substantial manner, the interaction through the exchange of miss-streams has to be very intense, making it feasible for the mistreated nodes to detect and react to exploitation. This robustness ceases to exist when nodes fetch and store objects in response to remote requests, i.e., when they operate as Level-2 caches (or proxies) for other nodes. Regarding mistreatment due to a common scheme, we show that this can easily take place when the "outlier" characteristics of some of the nodes get overlooked. This finding underscores the importance of allowing cooperative caching nodes the flexibility of choosing from a diverse set of schemes to fit the peculiarities of individual nodes. To that end, we outline an emulation-based framework for the development of mistreatment-resilient distributed selfish caching schemes. Our framework utilizes a simple control-theoretic approach to dynamically parameterize the cache management scheme. We show performance evaluation results that quantify the benefits from instantiating such a framework, which could be substantial under skewed demand profiles.National Science Foundation (CNS Cybertrust 0524477, CNS NeTS 0520166, CNS ITR 0205294, EIA RI 0202067); EU IST (CASCADAS and E-NEXT); Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship of the EU (MOIF-CT-2005-007230

Deterministic Object Management in Large Distributed Systems

Caching is a widely used technique to improve the scalability of distributed systems. A central issue with caching is maintaining object replicas consistent with their master copies. Large distributed systems, such as the Web, typically deploy heuristic-based consistency mechanisms, which increase delay and place extra load on the servers, while not providing guarantees that cached copies served to clients are up-to-date. Server-driven invalidation has been proposed as an approach to strong cache consistency, but it requires servers to keep track of which objects are cached by which clients. We propose an alternative approach to strong cache consistency, called MONARCH, which does not require servers to maintain per-client state. Our approach builds on a few key observations. Large and popular sites, which attract the majority of the traffic, construct their pages from distinct components with various characteristics. Components may have different content types, change characteristics, and semantics. These components are merged together to produce a monolithic page, and the information about their uniqueness is lost. In our view, pages should serve as containers holding distinct objects with heterogeneous type and change characteristics while preserving the boundaries between these objects. Servers compile object characteristics and information about relationships between containers and embedded objects into explicit object management commands. Servers piggyback these commands onto existing request/response traffic so that client caches can use these commands to make object management decisions. The use of explicit content control commands is a deterministic, rather than heuristic, object management mechanism that gives content providers more control over their content. The deterministic object management with strong cache consistency offered by MONARCH allows content providers to make more of their content cacheable. Furthermore, MONARCH enables content providers to expose internal structure of their pages to clients. We evaluated MONARCH using simulations with content collected from real Web sites. The results show that MONARCH provides strong cache consistency for all objects, even for unpredictably changing ones, and incurs smaller byte and message overhead than heuristic policies. The results also show that as the request arrival rate or the number of clients increases, the amount of server state maintained by MONARCH remains the same while the amount of server state incurred by server invalidation mechanisms grows

Analysis of distributed multi-periodic systems to achieve consistent data matching

International audienceDistributed real-time architecture of an embedded system is often described as a set of communicating components. Such a system is data flow (for its description) and time-triggered (for its execution). This work fits in with these problematics and focuses on the control of the time compatibility of a set of interdependent data used by the system components. The architecture of a component-based system forms a graph of communicating components, where more than one path can link two components. These paths may have different timing characteristics but the flows of information which transit on these paths may need to be adequately matched, so that a component uses inputs which all (directly or indirectly) depend on the same production step. In this paper, we define this temporal datamatching property, we show how to analyze the architecture to detect situations that cause data matching inconsistencies, and we describe an approach to manage data matching that uses queues to delay too fast paths and timestamps to recognize consistent data

A cache framework for nomadic clients of web services

This research explores the problems associated with caching of SOAP Web Service request/response pairs, and presents a domain independent framework enabling transparent caching of Web Service requests for mobile clients. The framework intercepts method calls intended for the web service and proceeds by buffering and caching of the outgoing method call and the inbound responses. This enables a mobile application to seamlessly use Web Services by masking fluctuations in network conditions. This framework addresses two main issues, firstly how to enrich the WS standards to enable caching and secondly how to maintain consistency for state dependent Web Service request/response pairs

Rethinking Consistency Management in Real-time Collaborative Editing Systems

Networked computer systems offer much to support collaborative editing of shared documents among users. Increasing concurrent access to shared documents by allowing multiple users to contribute to and/or track changes to these shared documents is the goal of real-time collaborative editing systems (RTCES); yet concurrent access is either limited in existing systems that employ exclusive locking or concurrency control algorithms such as operational transformation (OT) may be employed to enable concurrent access. Unfortunately, such OT based schemes are costly with respect to communication and computation. Further, existing systems are often specialized in their functionality and require users to adopt new, unfamiliar software to enable collaboration. This research discusses our work in improving consistency management in RTCES. We have developed a set of deadlock-free multi-granular dynamic locking algorithms and data structures that maximize concurrent access to shared documents while minimizing communication cost. These algorithms provide a high level of service for concurrent access to the shared document and integrate merge-based or OT-based consistency maintenance policies locally among a subset of the users within a subsection of the document – thus reducing the communication costs in maintaining consistency. Additionally, we have developed client-server and P2P implementations of our hierarchical document management algorithms. Simulations results indicate that our approach achieves significant communication and computation cost savings. We have also developed a hierarchical reduction algorithm that can minimize the space required of RTCES, and this algorithm may be pipelined through our document tree. Further, we have developed an architecture that allows for a heterogeneous set of client editing software to connect with a heterogeneous set of server document repositories via Web services. This architecture supports our algorithms and does not require client or server technologies to be modified – thus it is able to accommodate existing, favored editing and repository tools. Finally, we have developed a prototype benchmark system of our architecture that is responsive to users’ actions and minimizes communication costs

A Transaction Model for Mobile Computing

We introduce a prewrite operation before a write operation in a mobile transaction to improve data availability. A prewrite operation does not update the state of a data object but only makes visible the value that the data object will have after the commit of the transaction. Once the transaction has read all the values and declares all the prewrites, it can precommit at a mobile host. The remaining transaction\u27s execution is shifted to the stationary host. Writes on a database consume both time and resources at the stationary host and are therefore delayed. A pre-committed transaction\u27s prewrite values are made visible both at mobile and stationary hosts before the final commit of the transaction. This increases data availability during frequent disconnection common in mobile computing. Since the expensive part of the transaction execution is shifted to the stationary host, it reduces the computing expenses at the mobile hos