Object prefetching using semantic links

Abstract

To date the most common means of gaining access to the Internet continues to be via dial-up modem connections. These slow communication channels significantly affect the rendering of the majority of web pages. Higher speed communications channels can alleviate rendering latency but based on the web page's content, delays still are incurred. The technique of web object prefetching can expedite the presentation of web pages by utilizing the current web page's view time to acquire the web objects of future web pages. The proposed Semantic Link Prefetcher utilizes information associated with the current web page's hyperlink set to predict which web objects to prefetch during the limited view time interval of the current web page. The results presented in this paper show that this proposed method can be effective in improving a web browser's cache-hit percentage, while significantly lowering web page rendering latency.