Proactive Web caching with cumulative prefetching for large multimedia data

Web proxy caching provides an effective way to reduce access latency and ba ndwidth consumption, and thus improve performance of the World Wide Web. Du e to the simplicity of incorporating various types of data into the Web, no n-negligible access for large multimedia data is observed. Large multimedia data transfer, requiring a long-lived connection with consecutive data tra nsmissions, often fails over wide area networks. Repetitive attempts to fet ch large objects through proxy caches would waste network resources with no success guaranteed. In this paper, we propose on-demand cumulative prefetc hing to enhance proxy caches for better data availability of large multimed ia files. Our analysis shows that on-demand cumulative prefetching can be p erformed within a few trials with minimal additional bandwidth requirement. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme substantiall y reduces error rate and increases byte hit rate for large multimedia data. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.