The gains are particularly high for short request-response applications like the Web. Effective use of a large number of relatively small caches is a non-trivial problem. On the other hand, if an item is cached too sparsely, then access latencies for that item would not decrease, and again, the cache performance would be sub par. An item is cached only once within a given cache radius. Further, we use a modulus function to obtain even distribution of items within a path of given radius.
Active nodes can keep a periodically updated list of items cached at neighbors.
The cache check at any node includes checking the in-node cache, and the list of caches of neighbors. Otherwise a cache hit is recorded at the neighbor. AN-Sim simulates an active network in which the network defines a finite set of functions that can be computed at each active node.