Integrating Web caching and Web prefetching in client-side proxies

Web caching and Web prefetching are two important techniques used to reduce the noticeable response time perceived by users. Note that by integrating Web caching and Web prefetching, these two techniques can complement each other since the Web caching technique exploits the temporal locality, whereas Web prefetching technique utilizes the spatial locality of Web objects. However, without circumspect design, the integration of these two techniques might cause significant performance degradation to each other. In view of this, we propose in this paper an innovative cache replacement algorithm, which not only considers the caching effect in the Web environment, but also evaluates the prefetching rules provided by various prefetching schemes. Specifically, we formulate a normalized profit function to evaluate the profit from caching an object (i.e., either a nonimplied object or an implied object according to some prefetching rule). Based on the normalized profit function devised, we devise an innovative Web cache replacement algorithm, referred to as Algorithm IWCP (standing for the Integration of Web Caching and Prefetching). Using an event-driven simulation, we evaluate the performance of Algorithm IWCP under several circumstances. The experimental results show that Algorithm IWCP consistently outperforms the companion schemes in various performance metrics.