A Feasibility Study of Cache in Smart Edge Router for Web-Access Accelerator

Abstract

Regardless of the setting, edge computing has drawn much attention from both the academic and industrial communities. For edge computing, content delivery networks are both a concrete and production deployable use case. While viable at the WAN or telco edge scale, it is unclear if this extends to others, such as in home WiFi routers, as has been assumed by some. In this work-in-progress, we present an initial study on the viability of using smart edge WiFi routers as a caching location. We describe the simulator we created to test this, as well as the analysis of the results obtained. We use 1 day of e-commerce web log traffic from a public data set, as well as a sampled subset of our own site - part of an ecosystem of over 111 million users. We show that in the best case scenario, smart edge routers are inappropriate for e-commerce web caching.