SPN Model for Web Prefetching and Caching

Lei Shi, Xiaoguang Ding, Lin Wei, Zhimin Gu

Abstract: 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 service. In this paper, a SPN (Stochastic Petri Nets) model of Web prefetching and caching system is constructed, and based on which, the performance analysis of the integrated Web prefetching and caching model are made. The performance metrics latency, throughput are compared and analyzed theoretically. Simulations show that compared with caching mechanism, Web prefetching mechanism can further reduce the access latency, improve the throughput and the hit ratio efficiently. The performance evaluation based on the SPN model provides an implementation basis for Web prefetching and caching.