x-ICP: A Mobile Web Caching Protocol

Internet access by nomadic users roaming on a mobile network presents a scenario of access that is substantially different from the wired network. With current Web caching technology, accessing the Web while mobile is slow not only because of bandwidth limitations, but also due to moving away from the home Web caching proxy. Furthermore, current Web caching strategies ignore Web access patterns during periods of mobility. Studies of such scenarios are scarce. In this paper, we propose an Extended Internet Caching Protocol (x-ICP), in which the proxy server of the nomadic user’s newly visited network can retrieve Web objects from its home network proxy server. Such a scheme decreases the response time for the requests by fetching an object from a usually nearby home network rather than from the origin site. We use trace-based analysis and analytic modeling methods to evaluate x-ICP. We draw several conclusions, all suggesting that x-ICP would be an effective Web caching approach for nomadic users.