The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science


PhD Qualifying Examination


"Caching Strategies for theWorld Wide Web: a Survey"

By Mr. Wenwu Lou


Abstract:

The World Wide Web (WWW) has been increasingly adopted as the
infrastructure for globally distributed information system.
However, studies on Web performance have shown that the Web is far
from being an efficient one. The rapid growth in Web usage has put
increasing pressure on the network traffic and workload on
individual Web servers. Various attempts have been made to improve
the Web performance, among which the Web caching techniques have
drawn most attention from both academic and industrial
communities. Web caching can reduce the network traffic, alleviate
and balance server workload, enhance server availability, and
reduce retrieval latency.

Since its emergence in early 1990's, numerous research has been
conducted, addressing various aspects of Web caching. There is a
need for a systematic classification and understanding of these
research findings. In this paper, we survey the state-of-art Web
caching techniques that have either been adopted in real-world
systems or published in the literatures. Specifically, these Web
caching techniques have been examined from four aspects, including
caching schemes, caching architectures, cache replacement
strategies, and cache coherency mechanisms. Finally, we focus on
the dynamic Web caching, which is substantially different from the
traditional static Web caching techniques and proposes challenges
to their applications. We believe that a comprehensive survey of
previous works on Web caching techniques would help to identify
the relevance of existing research and possible directions for
future research in the area.


Date:                   Friday, 12 October 2001

Time:                   3:00p.m.-5:00p.m.

Venue:                  Room 4480
                        Lift 25-26

Committee Members:      	Prof. Hongjun Lu (Supervisor)
                        Dr. Qiang Yang (Chairman)
                        Prof. Dik-Lun Lee
                        Prof. Frederick Lochovsky


**** ALL are Welcome ****