Cooperative proxies network performance analysis

We compare the information retrieval performance of a network based on nodes with layer 3 and the same network based on nodes with layer 3 and 7. We begin to analyse a simple case (chain of proxies) and generalize this case in a multiline network of proxies. In this way we create a simple formulation to evaluate the gain of layer 7 (caching) with respect to the layer 3 (routing), by taking into account data request, data response, process and propagation delay. We propose the performance analysis for three different scenarios where the hit probability profile models are fixed.