A Survey of Web Caching and Prefetching

Web caching and prefetching are the most popular techniques that play a key role in improving the Web performance by keeping web objects that are likely to be visited in the near future closer to the client. Web caching can work independently or integrated with the web prefetching. The Web caching and prefetching can complement each other since the web caching exploits the temporal locality for predicting revisiting requested objects, while the web prefetching utilizes the spatial locality for predicting next related web objects of the requested Web objects. This paper reviews principles and some existing web caching and prefetching approaches. The conventional and intelligent web caching techniques are investigated and discussed. Moreover, Web prefetching techniques are summarized and classified with comparison limitations of these approaches. This paper also presents and discusses some studies that take into consideration impact of integrating both web caching and web prefetching together.