Title: Demand-based Document Dissemination for the World-Wide Web
Author: Azer Bestavros
Date: February 15, 1995

Abstract:
We analyzed the logs of our departmental HTTP server {\tt
http://cs-www.bu.edu} as well as the logs the more popular Rolling
Stones HTTP server {\tt http://www.stones.com}. These servers have
very different purposes; the former caters primarily to local clients,
whereas the latter caters exclusively to remote clients all over the
world. In both cases, our analysis showed that remote HTTP accesses
were confined to a very small subset of documents.  Using an
analytical model of server popularity and file access profiles, we
show that by disseminating the most popular documents on servers
(proxies) closer to the clients, network traffic could be reduced
considerably, while server loads are balanced. We argue that this
process could be generalized so as to provide for an automated
demand-based duplication of documents. In that respect, we sketch the
DDD-WWW protocol to implement this Demand-based Document Dissemination
on the WWW. We believe that such server-based information
dissemination protocols will be more effective at reducing {\em both}
network bandwidth and document retrieval times than client-based
caching protocols \cite{bestavros:95c}.