Determining WWW user´s next access and its application to pre-fetching

World-Wide Web (WWW) services have grown to levels where significant delays are expected to happen. Prefetching techniques are likely to help reduce waiting times. However pre-fetching is only effective if the right documents are identified and if user´s move is correctly predicted. Therefore, it is productive to determine whether a revisit will occur or not, before starting pre-fetching. In this paper we develop two user models that help determine user´s next move. One model uses random walk approximation and the other is based on digital signal processing techniques. We also give hints on how to use such models with a simple pre-fetching technique that we are developing