Proxy-Based Index Caching for Content-Addressable Networks

Content-Addressable Network (CAN) provides a mechanism that could retrieve objects in a P2P network by maintaining indices to those objects in a fully decentralized manner. In the CAN system, index caching is a useful technique for reducing the response time of retrieving objects. The key points of effective caching techniques are to improve cache hit ratio by actively sharing caches distributed over the P2P network with every node and to reduce a maintenance and/or routing overhead for locating the cache of a requested index. In this paper, we propose a new caching technique based on the notion of proxy-type caching techniques which have been widely used in WWW systems. It can achieve active cache sharing by incorporating the concept of proxy caching into the index access mechanism and locate a closer proxy cache of a requested index with a little routing overhead. By the result of simulations, we conclude that it can improve the response time of retrieving indices by 30% compared with conventional caching techniques.