B.Shanmugasundaram “A Study on Web Prefetching Techniques

The growth of the World Wide Web has emphasized the need for improvement in user latency. One of the techniques that are used for improving user latency is Web Prefetching. Web prefetching is one of the techniques proposed to reduce user’s perceived latencies in the World Wide Web. The spatial locality shown by user’s accesses makes it possible to predict future accesses based on the previous ones. A prefetching engine uses these predictions to prefetch the web objects before the user demands them. The existing prediction algorithms achieved an acceptable performance when they were proposed but the high increase in the amount of embedded objects per page has reduced their effectiveness in the current web. Web prefetching is becoming important and demanding, even though the Web caching technique has been improved. Web prefetching is an effective tool for improving the access to the World Wide Web. Prefetch-ing can be initiated either at the client side or at the server side