Utilizing layered multicast for Web caching

Wireless broadcast networks are currently widely deployed to connect users to their Internet providers, but only point-to-point services are typically used over these networks. Multicast Web caching is a readily-available technique embracing the broadcast capabilities of wireless links and benefiting from them. However, certain trade-offs of full multicast Web caching must be taken into consideration, such as an increased amount of data traffic, which must be processed by each client node. This paper analyzes the efficiency of different variations of multicast Web caching and compares them with common hierarchical Web caching. Furthermore, we present a new layered multicast Web caching scheme that allows for significant reductions of the required processing and storage capacity, while introducing only a small inefficiency compared to full multicast Web caching. The overall efficiency of this new approach is validated using trace-based simulation.