Optimal proactive caching in peer-to-peer network: Analysis and application

As a promising new technology with the unique properties like high efficiency, scalability and fault tolerance, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology is used as the underlying network to build new Internet- scale applications. However, one of the well known issues in such an application (for example WWW) is that the distribution of data popularities is heavily tailed with a Zipf-like distribution. With consideration of the skewed popularity we adopt a proactive caching approach to handle the challenge, and focus on two key problems: where(i.e. the placement strategy: where to place the replicas) and how(i.e. the degree problem: how many replicas are assigned to one specific content)? For the where problem, we propose a novel approach which can be generally applied to structured P2P networks. Next, we solve two optimization objectives related to the how problem: MAXPERF and MINCOST. Our solution is called PoPCache, and we discover two interesting properties: (1) the number of replicas assigned to each content is proportional to its popularity; (2) the derived optimal solutions are related to the entropy of popularity. To our knowledge, none of the previous works has mentioned such results. Finally, we apply the results of PoPCache to propose a P2P base web caching, called as Web- PoPCache. By means of web cache trace driven simulation, our extensive evaluation results demonstrate the advantages of PoPCache and Web-PoPCache.