Basis Token Consistency - Extending and Evaluating a Novel Web Consistency Algorithm

With web caching and cache-related services like CDNs and edge services playing an increasingly significant role in the modern internet, the problem of the weak consistency and coherence provisions in currently standardized web protocols is drawing greater attention. Toward this end, we propose definitions of consistency and coherence for web-like caching environments, and then present a novel web protocol we call "Basis Token Consistency" (BTC). This protocol allows compliant caches to guarantee strongly consistent views of content retrieved from supporting servers. We discuss this protocol and its extensions, and compare the performance of BTC with the traditional TTL (Time To Live) algorithm under a range of synthetic workloads