An SPN-Based Integrated Model for Web Prefetching and Caching

The World Wide Web has become the primary means for information dissemination. Due to the limited resources of the network bandwidth, users always suffer from long time waiting. Web prefetching and web caching are the primary approaches to reducing the user perceived access latency and improving the quality of services. In this paper, a Stochastic Petri Nets (SPN) based integrated web prefetching and caching model (IWPCM) is presented and the performance evaluation of IWPCM is made. The performance metrics, access latency, throughput, HR (hit ratio) and BHR (byte hit ratio) are analyzed and discussed. Simulations show that compared with caching only model (CM), IWPCM can further improve the throughput, HR and BHR efficiently and reduce the access latency. The performance evaluation based on the SPN model can provide a basis for implementation of web prefetching and caching and the combination of web prefetching and caching holds the promise of improving the QoS of web systems.