Active dispatching schemes for Web caches in mobile networks

The caching technology is now commonly used to reduce the response time and save the bandwidth for hot Web accesses. The performance can be further improved by clustering several caches together, where a dispatcher is adopted to select a suitable cache from the cache cluster for each request. Therefore, ways to appropriately configure the cache cluster and design the dispatching scheme become important issues. The architecture of distributed dispatchers using the active networking technology is proposed to adaptively dispatch each request to an appropriate cache, according to network conditions and cache loads. The concept of virtual clusters, that distant caches can belong to the same cluster and a cache can belong to more than one cluster, is also proposed to balance the loads of caches globally.