A Locality-Aware Cooperative Cache Management Protocol to Improve Network File System Performance

In a distributed environment the utilization of file buffer caches in different clients may vary greatly. Cooperative caching is used to increase cache utilization by coordinating the usage of distributed caches. Existing cooperative caching protocols mainly address organizational issues, paying little attention to exploiting locality of file access patterns. We propose a locality-aware cooperative caching protocol, called LAC, that is based on analysis and manipulation of data block reuse distance to effectively predict cache utilization and the probability of data reuse. Using a dynamically controlled synchronization technique, we make local information consistently comparable among clients. The system is highly scalable in the sense that global coordination is achieved without centralized control.