Distributed Collaborative Caching for WWW

• Main Author: Liu, Wei
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1993/2536

The 'World Wide Web' ('WWW') offers an opportunity for users to share information and collaborate on activities globally. Better performance of the WWW is expected. This thesis presents a model and prototype implementation of a system that applies distributed system management techniques to the WWW. This system (called 'Distributed Collaborative Caching for WWW') provides a large distributed shared memory that is shared across a set of browsers in a network with no central server involved. This is a fully distributed approach for document sharing between browsers. The collaboration and sharing are supported by a shared virtual memory paradigm. The major design contributions in this thesis are: (1) Greater availability of documents even if a remote server has crashed because a copy of the document may be accessed from the 'Distributed Share Memory' (DSM). This helps to isolate end-users from server and network failures. (2) Decreased response times when retrieving documents because documents may be retrievedlocally from the DSM. (3) Reduced server load and network traffic because requested documents can be delivered to the clients directly from DSM without a connection to the remote server. This approach has some benefits beyond the popular proxy caching approaches: (1) No proxy caching server. (2) Use collaboration (between browsers) instead of centralization (proxy caching). (3) Guarantee high scalability and reliability. (4) No "single point of failure". A prototype 'Distributed Collaborative Caching for WWW' is implemented and its performance is measured and evaluated. The results are promising.