A Distributed Internet Cache

This paper outlines the need for replication of resources on the Internet to combat the huge growth in user population and bandwidth requirements. It describes deeciencies in an existing hierarchical ca-ching scheme for document replication and presents an alternative approach that more widely distributes the load across multiple servers, and provides additional resource discovery features. A simulation experiment which compares the distributed and hierarchical approaches is described and its results presented. These results indicate the applicability of the distributed caching scheme in the majority of situations considered.