Improving Packet Caching Scalability Through the Concept of an Explicit End of Data Marker

Over the past few years, the Web has witnessed an explosion of dynamic content generation to provide Web users with an interactive and personalized experience. While traditional Web caching techniques work well when redundancy occurs on an object-level basis (page, image, etc.), the use of dynamic content presents unique challenges. Although past work has addressed mechanisms for detecting redundancy despite dynamic content, the scalability of such techniques is limited. In this paper, we present a technique for explicit packet boundary delineation to enable scalable and highly efficient packet caching in the network. Our approach, explicit end of data (EEOD), does not require client-side modification and requires only minimal server-side modifications. We demonstrate through experimental studies on an Apache Web server 25% and 30% relative improvements in terms of bandwidth efficiency and retrieval time over current approaches in the literature