ICache: A Size-Aware Cooperative Caching Architecture for Web Images

This paper designs an efficient cooperative caching architecture for images, named iCache, which introduces super cache servers in caching system and caches images using different policies according to image size. The small-size images are stored in cache server directly, while the large-size images are divided into small blocks which are distributed in multiple cache servers in order to achieve scalability and load balance. Furthermore, the paper proposes corresponding storage policy and replacement mechanism for iCache that stores the least copies of large-size images to save space and giving them higher priority to keep in cache than small ones for increasing the byte hit rate. The simulation experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of iCache architecture and the results show that the proposed scheme offers good search efficiency and hit rate with cooperation overhead significatively lower than that of other cooperative mechanisms.