Analysis and evaluation of expiration-based hierarchical caching systems

This paper investigates some fundamental properties and performance issues of the expiration-based caching systems. We focus on the hierarchical caching systems based on the time-to-live (TTL) expiration mechanism, and present a basic model for such systems. By analyzing the intrinsic timing behavior in this model, we derive some important performance metrics from the perspectives of caching systems and end users, respectively. We use network simulation results to further substantiate the efficacy of our analysis. Our results show some basic properties and trade-offs for a hierarchical caching system based on the weak consistency mechanism. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.