Web proxy cache replacement scheme based on back-propagation neural network

Web proxy caches are used to reduce the strain of contemporary web traffic on web servers and network bandwidth providers. In this research, a novel approach to web proxy cache replacement which utilizes neural networks for replacement decisions is developed and analyzed. Neural networks are trained to classify cacheable objects from real world data sets using information known to be important in web proxy caching, such as frequency and recency. Correct classification ratios between 0.85 and 0.88 are obtained both for data used for training and data not used for training. Our approach is compared with Least Recently Used (LRU), Least Frequently Used (LFU) and the optimal case which always rates an object with the number of future requests. Performance is evaluated in simulation for various neural network structures and cache conditions. The final neural networks achieve hit rates that are 86.60% of the optimal in the worst case and 100% of the optimal in the best case. Byte-hit rates are 93.36% of the optimal in the worst case and 99.92% of the optimal in the best case. We examine the input-to-output mappings of individual neural networks and analyze the resulting caching strategy with respect to specific cache conditions.