Integrating Web Prefetching and Caching Using Prediction Models

Abstract

Web caching and prefetching have been studied in the past separately. In this paper, we present an integrated architecture for Web object caching and prefetching. Our goal is to design a prefetching system that can work with an existing Web caching system in a seamless manner. In this integrated architecture, a certain amount of caching space is reserved for prefetching. To empower the prefetching engine, a Web-object prediction model is built by mining the frequent paths from past Web log data. We show that the integrated architecture improves the performance over Web caching alone, and present our analysis on the tradeoff between the reduced latency and the potential increase in network load.