Caching Policies for Transient Data

This work focuses on designing caching policies for transient data, i.e., data which can be used to serve requests only for a finite duration of time after which it becomes redundant. We first characterize the fundamental limit on the performance of caching policies for transient data and characterize the performance of traditional caching policies like LRU for this setting. Traditional caching policies often make decisions based on the popularity of the data being cached. We propose a new caching policy which uses both the popularity and the residual lifetime (time remaining before the data becomes redundant) to make caching decisions. We show that in the setting where data being cached is transient, our policy outperforms traditional caching policies.