Analysis of a Cyclic Multicast Proxy Server Architecture

The exponential growths of the World Wide Web (WWW) users have made the deployment of proxy servers popular on a network with limited resources. WWW clients perceive better response time, improved performance and speed when response to requested pages are served from the cache of a proxy server, resulting in faster response times after the first document fetch. This work proposes cyclic multicast as a scalable technique for improving proxy server performance for next generation networks. The proposed system uses a cyclic multicast engine for the delivery of popular web pages from the proxy server cache to increasingly large users under limited server capacity and network resources. The cyclic multicast technique would be more efficient for the delivery of highly requested web pages from the cache to large number of receivers. We describe the operation of the cyclic multicast proxy server and characterized the gains in performance.