File popularity characterisation.

A key determinant of the effectiveness of a web cache is the locality of the files requested. In the past this has been difficult to model, as locality appears to be cache specific. We show that locality can be characterised with a single parameter, which primarily varies with the topological position of the cache, and is largely independent of the culture of the cache users. Accurate cache models can therefore be built without any need to consider cultural effects that are hard to predict