Prefetching Hyperlinks

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%).