Caching support for push-pull data dissemination using data-snooping routers

Internet applications such as the HTTP-Web, audio-video streaming and file sharing depend on wide-area data dissemination. Clients of these applications suffer from long delays due to network queuing, bandwidth limitations and adverse effects of bandwidth sharing between different traffic. Caching reduces delays and saves network bandwidth by holding the fetched data and responding to the subsequent requests locally. Existing distributed caching solutions are application-specific and do not support delivery in the push-pull directions at the same time. Our proposed architecture, called storage embedded networks, gives application-and direction-independent caching support by using memory-embedded, data-snooping routers. These router caches can act both as a client proxy and a server accelerator. We compare our architecture to the Web caches operating in forward proxy mode. We report additional reductions in client response times and server loads over proxies using the same cache sizes.