A Framework for Multi-source Prefetching Through Adaptive Weight

Abstract

The World Wide Web has come to be a great part of our daily life, yet user observed latency is still a problem that needs a proper means of handling. Even though earlier attempts focused on caching as the chief solution to tackling this issue, its success was extremely limited. Prefetching has come to be the primary technique in supplementing caching towards soothing the latency problem associated with the contemporary Internet. However, existing approaches in prefetching are extremely limited in their ability to employ application level web document relationship which is often visible only to the content developer. This is because most approaches are access history based schemes that make future users' access prediction only based on past user access. Attempts to incorporate prefetching schemes that utilize semantic information with those that use users past access history are extremely limited in their extensibility. In this work we present a novel framework that enables integration of schemes from both worlds of prefetching without the need for a major modification to the algorithms. When there is a need/possibility to capture new application level context, a new algorithm could be developed to do so and then it can be integrated into the framework. Since each participating scheme is merely viewed as an algorithm that produces a list of candidate objects that are likely to be accessed in the near future, the framework can entertain any one of the existing prefetching schemes. With its adaptive weight management technique the framework adjusts the effect of each algorithm in the overall prediction to parallel with its observed performance so far. We have found this formwork to be less aggressive than its contemporary counterparts which is extremely important for resource constrained mobile devices that have come to be the major means of access by users of the current web.