The Harvest caching architecture, in which individual caches can be interconnected hierarchically to mirror an internetwork's topology, is described in [5]. There is an effort underway, headed by Hans-Werner Braun and Kim Claffy at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, to put Harvest caches into place at high-level parts of the U.S. research and educational networking infrastructure, for the purpose of reducing backbone network traffic [8].
Server-based replication of objects is argued for in [2] and [6]. Both papers argue that network traffic and server load could be reduced considerably by having servers disseminate their most popular documents on servers closer to clients. Both also point out the need for integration of producer-based dissemination and consumer-based caching of documents, with caching being the most effective way to reduce latency. Furthermore, both papers point out the need for naming conventions and name resolution protocols that provide location and replication transparency.
The use of a wide-area file system for storing and retrieving WWW documents is proposed in [10]. Wide-area file system features of location transparency, access control lists, authentication, client caching, data replication, and file migration are suggested for improving performance, decreasing server and network load, and increasing security. Based on their analyses of WWW client and server traces, the authors recommend the use of predictive document repositories rather than reactive document caches.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has formed a working group to standardize formats for Uniform Resource Names (URNs) [9] and protocols for URN resolution.