``Network distance'' in various forms has been studied by a number of groups. For example, NLANR's Measurement and Operations Analysis Team measured web server and cache performance, recognizing the effects of network and server load on effective performance [6]. The multimedia community is also examining this notion extensively, especially in the area of video-on-demand service. Such projects include [5,11]. We believe that the network behavior exhibited during the Simple SARA experiments support these notions of ``network distance'' and can be viewed within a larger framework.
Note that SARA is also related to digital library applications which share the goal of accessing files over shared networks. The Alexandria Digital Library Project at UCSB has studied the performance of Web-based applications in the context of digital library and information access systems [1,16]. This work addresses issues of load balancing among clustered digital library server nodes to improve throughput in response to client requests.
Other web proxy caching work in [4,8] examines the use of document caches to improve performance for web clients. This work focuses on scheduling in a slightly different context: the process of deciding what and where to perform caching and the subsequent decision of which of several potential caches to use for future queries. These papers are representative of a growing body of work focusing on the development of performance-efficient strategies for accessing and processing remote files in multi-user environments.