Interactive web caching for slow or intermittent networks

Abstract

We explore the limitations of existing caching mechanisms in slow networks and propose a new model of web caching designed for developing regions called interactive caching. Unlike conventional caching, interactive caching makes interacting with the cache the focus of web browsing when the connection is bad. Interactive caching achieves this by organizing the cache into topics for presentation to the user, optimizing for latency, and unaliasing cached content. In this paper we implement a prototypical version of interactive caching that includes: topic identification and presentation, a latency aware value function, DNS caching, and missing hyperlink suggestions. We evaluate our system based on a system implementation and web traces from multiple web cache deployments across different geographic locations in developing regions. We show how interactive caching can dramatically improve the user experience for slow connections by allowing users to explore the cache using trending topics that cover 60 - 80% of requests and reducing page load times by up to 72.86%.