We propose a unified methodology to analyze the performance of caches (both isolated and interconnected), by extending and generalizing a decoupling technique originally known as Che's approximation, which provides very accurate results at low computational cost. We consider several caching policies (including very attractive one, called k-LRU), taking into account the effects of temporal locality. In the case of interconnected caches, our approach allows us to do better than the Poisson approximation commonly adopted in prior work. Our results, validated against simulations and trace-driven experiments, provide interesting insights into the performance of caching systems.

Abstract-Multi-hop wireless networks employing random access protocols have been shown to incur large discrepancies in the throughputs achieved by the flows sharing the network. Indeed, flow throughputs can span orders of magnitude from near starvation to many times greater than the mean. In this paper, we address the foundations of this disparity. We show that the fundamental cause is not merely differences in the number of contending neighbors, but a generic coordination problem of CSMA-based random access in a multi-hop environment. We develop a new analytical model that incorporates this lack of coordination, identifies dominating and starving flows and accurately predicts per-flow throughput in a large-scale network. We then propose metrics that quantify throughput imbalances due to the MAC protocol operation. Our model and metrics provide a deeper understanding of the behavior of CSMA protocols in arbitrary topologies and can aid the design of effective protocol solutions to the starvation problem.

The dimensioning of caching systems represents a difficult task in the design of infrastructures for content distribution in the current Internet. This paper addresses the problem of defining a realistic arrival process for the content requests generated by users, due its critical importance for both analytical and simulative evaluations of the performance of caching systems. First, with the aid of YouTube traces collected inside operational residential networks, we identify the characteristics of real traffic that need to be considered or can be safely neglected in order to accurately predict the performance of a cache. Second, we propose a new parsimonious traffic model, named the Shot Noise Model (SNM), that enables users to natively capture the dynamics of content popularity, whilst still being sufficiently simple to be employed effectively for both analytical and scalable simulative studies of caching systems. Finally, our results show that the SNM presents a much better solution to account for the temporal locality observed in real traffic compared to existing approaches.

In this paper, we decompose a large-or small-scale multi-hop wireless network into embedded subgraphs, each consisting of four nodes and two flow pairs. We systematically study all twelve possible topologies that arise according to whether the different nodes are in radio range of each other. We show that under both a random spatial distribution of nodes and random waypoint mobility with shortest-path routing, a critical and highly probable scenario is a class in which the channel state shared by the two flows is not only incomplete (i.e., the graph is not fully connected), but there is also asymmetry in the state between the two flows. We develop an accurate analytical model validated by simulations to characterize the long-term unfairness that naturally arises when CSMA with twoor four-way handshake is employed as a random access protocol. Moreover, we show that another key class of topologies consists of incomplete but symmetric shared state. We show via modeling and simulations that in this case, the system achieves long-term fairness, yet endures significant durations in which one flow dominates channel access with many repeated transmissions before relinquishing the channel. The model predicts the time-scales of this unfairness as a function of system parameters such as the maximum retransmission limit.

We propose a unified methodology to analyze the performance of caches (both isolated and interconnected), by extending and generalizing a decoupling technique originally known as Che’s approximation, which provides very accurate results at low computational cost. We consider several caching policies (including a very attractive one, called k -LRU), taking into account the effects of temporal locality. In the case of interconnected caches, our approach allows us to do better than the Poisson approximation commonly adopted in prior work. Our results, validated against simulations and trace-driven experiments, provide interesting insights into the performance of caching systems.