The efficient delivery of web content has been identified as a key issue of research for some time. Forward (or reverse) proxies, which are positioned along the request route from the users' browsers to the origin content servers, maintain a cache with copies of content from their origin servers. The strategic placement of proxies across the backbone ISP or the Content Delivery Network can drastically improve the performance of the system (in terms of network bandwidth savings, origin server load, and user-request latency).

The ultimate goal of this work is to develop a tool that decides on the position and the number of proxies required in order to achieve given performance improvements (expressed in terms of network bandwidth, origin server load, and user-latency). We believe such a tool will be very helpful to ISPs/CDNs, content providers, and end-users and is, thus, very much lacking.