Proxy ecology – Cooperative proxies with artificial life

Abstract

Proxy servers have been widely used by institutions to serve their clients behind firewalls. Recently many schemes have been proposed to organize proxy servers into cooperative proxy cache systems. However most of existing proxy cache schemes require manual configuration of the cooperative proxies based on the network architecture. In this paper, we propose a novel P2P proxy caching scheme using an individual-based model. We borrow the ideas from the ecological system as well as the economical system to manage the cooperative proxies through data and information exchange among individual proxies. Proxies automatically configure themselves into a Virtual Proxy Graph. Data caching and data replication among the proxy nodes create artificial life in the proxies. The aggregate effect of caching and replicating actions by individual peer proxies forms a proxy ecology which automatically distributes data to nearest clients and balances workload. Our simulation results show that the proposed proxy caching scheme tremendously improves system performance. In addition, the individual-based design model ensures simplicity and scalability of the cache system.