The World-Wide Web, or the Web, is currently one of the most highly used network
services. Because of this, improvements and new technologies are rapidly being
developed and deployed. One important area of study is improving user response time
through the use of caching mechanisms. Most prior work considered multiple user
caches running on cache relay systems. These systems are mostly post-caching systems;
they perform no "look ahead," or pre-fetch, functions. This research studies a pre-fetch
caching scheme based on Web server access statistics. The scheme employs a
least-recently used replacement policy and allows for multiple simultaneous document
retrievals to occur. The scheme is based on a combined statistical and locality of
reference model associated with the links in hypertext systems. Results show that cache
hit rates are doubled over schemes that use only post-caching and are mixed for user
response time improvements. The conclusion is that pre-fetch caching Web documents
offers an improvement over post-caching methods and should be studied in detail for both
single user and multiple user systems.
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