Scalable Consistency Maintenance in Content Distribution Networks Using Cooperative Leases

In this paper, the authors argue that cache consistency mechanisms designed for stand-alone proxies do not scale to the large number of proxies in a content distribution network and are not flexible enough to allow consistency guarantees to be tailored to object needs. To meet the twin challenges of scalability and flexibility, they introduce the notion of cooperative consistency along with a mechanism, called cooperative leases, to achieve it. By supporting consistency semantics and by using a single lease for multiple proxies, cooperative leases allows the notion of leases to be applied in a flexible, scalable manner to CDNs.