Organizer: Ted Hardie
Summary: This BOF is intended to explore the possibility of deploying cache systems which act primarily on behalf of content providers.
Current cache hierarchies typically work by aggregating user communities. By pooling the results of content requests from within a community, caches elminate the need to cross non-local networks for repetitive requests; by creating cache hierarchies, caching systems create larger and larger communities. No matter what the size of the hierarchy, though, these systems act as proxies for the user communities and endeavor primarily to provide benefits for the networks serving those communities.
Current caching systems do, of course, help networks serving content hosts by reducing the traffic they must send to the networks served by caches. Content networks must still, however, provide transit for requests by users not served by traditional caches and for requests by each of the different user communities. As a result, an outward-facing proxy, or "surrogate", placed at the network border could significantly reduce internal transit for many networks. Aggregating content through surrogates would provide a context-sensitive method for providing benefits to the networks serving the content hosts similar to those which are currently provided by proxies to the networks serving user communities.
Since this type of caching is undertaken by an agent with which the content providers already have a relationship, many of the legal and economic problems related to the current proxy caching model can be eliminated. Many of the technical problems, however, remain, albeit in a slightly skewed form. The formost question is: How does traffic get to the surrogate? Are layer four switches appropriate for this method of content delivery? If so, are the problems in this application (IPSEC, in particular) any easier to solve than in the current proxy caching paradigm? If transparent redirection is not the answer, how can we accomplish lightweight notification of surrogate availability?