This paper presented a new shared cache technique-the grouping cache, which could solve many invalid queries in the broadcast probe and the control bottleneck of the centralized web cache by dividing all cooperative caches into several groups according to their positions in the network topology. The technique has the following characteristics: The overhead of multi-cache query can be reduced efficiently by the cache grouping scheme; the compact summary of the cache directory can rapidly determine if a request exists in a cache within the group; the distribution algorithm based on the web-access logs can effectively balance the load among all the groups. The simulation test demonstrated that the grouping cache was more effective than any other existing shared cache techniques.
