ALCOMFT-TR-01-41

Massimiliano Curcio, Stefano Leonardi and Andrea Vitaletti
Integrated Prefetching and Caching for the World Wide Web via User Cooperation
Rome. Work package 2. April 2001.

Abstract: Caching and prefetching have often been studied as separate tools for enhancing the access to the World Wide Web. The goal of this work is to show potentialities and limitations of integrating Caching and Prefetching for improving the performances of web navigation. We propose a new prefetching technique that uses a limited form of user cooperation to establish which documents to prefetch in the local cache at the client side. We show that our prefetching technique is highly beneficial only if integrated with a suitable caching algorithm. We consider two caching algorithms, Greedy-Dual-Size and Least Recently Used, and demonstrate on trace driven simulation that Greedy-Dual-Size with prefetching outperforms both LRU with prefetching and a set of popular caching algorithms. We also develop a prototype of a local proxy implementing our prefetching/caching technique to be used with a web browser.

Postscript file: ALCOMFT-TR-01-41.ps.gz (531 kb).