Why do research in Web Caching?
There are a number of reasons to do research in web caching. Many of them were brought up in a discussion on the ircache mailing list. For the original posts, see the thread on ‘free bandwidth’ in the ircache archives for September 1998. I generally break up motivations in web caching research as short term and long term. In the short term, there is the desire to improve upon web caching systems as they can affect the performance of the web today. This includes: • Reducing the cost of connecting to the Internet. Traffic on the web consumes more bandwidth than any other Internet service, and so any method that can reduce the bandwidth requirements is particularly welcome in parts of the world in which telecommunication services are much more expensive than in the U.S., and in which service is often provided on a cost per bit basis. Even when telecommunication costs are reasonable, a large percentage of traffic is destined to or from the U.S. and so must use expensive trans-oceanic netwo
