Improving the WWW: caching or multicast?

We consider two schemes for the distribution of popular Web documents. In the first scheme the sender repeatedly transmits the Web document into a multicast address, and receivers asynchronously join the corresponding multicast tree to receive a copy. In the second scheme, the document is distributed to the receivers through a hierarchy of Web caches. We develop analytical models for both schemes, and use the models to compare the two schemes in terms of latency and bandwidth usage. We find that except for documents that change very frequently, hierarchical caching gives lower latency and uses less bandwidth than multicast. For rapidly changing documents, multicast distribution reduces latency, saves network bandwidth, and reduces the load on the origin server. Furthermore, if a document is updated randomly rather than periodically, the relative performance of CMP improves. Therefore, the best overall performance is achieved when the Internet implements both solutions, hierarchical caching and multicast.