Pre-fetching techniques for effective web latency reduction — A survey

In recent years, the Web has become the primary means of information. It is being used for commercial, entertainment, or educational purposes and thus its popularity resulted in heavy traffic in the internet which in turn caused the users to experience a long latency when retrieving the Web pages. Potential sources of latency are the Web servers´ heavy load, network congestion, low bandwidth, bandwidth underutilization, and propagation delay. In order to reduce the latency, prefetching techniques that predicts the destination pages for user community are found to be useful and also to save the communication overhead. In this paper, we present a survey by exploring the various pre-fetching methods along with their parameters and applications that have been used by majority of the researchers in the field.