This paper develops a new method for prefetching Web pages into the
client cache. Clients send reference information to Web servers,
which aggregate the reference information in near-real-time and then
disperse the aggregated information to all clients, piggybacked on GET
responses. The information indicates how often hyperlink URLs
embedded in pages have been previously accessed relative to the
embedding page. Based on knowledge about which hyperlinks are
generally popular, clients initiate prefetching of the hyperlinks and
their embedded images according to any algorithm they prefer. Both
client and server may cap the prefetching mechanism's space overhead
and waste of network resources due to speculation. The result of
these differences is improved prefetching: lower client latency (by
52.3%) and less wasted network bandwidth (24.0%).
Technical Program