WebCompanion: A Friendly Client-Side Web Prefetching Agent

Accessing remote Web sites is often a frustrating experience for users because of long Web page retrieval times even over relatively fast Internet connections. Useres are more likely to embrace the further expansion of the role of the Web into a major infrastructure for electronic commerce and for information, application, and multi-media delivery if Web access can be accelerated. One technique that attempts this is prefetching. We built the client-side Java-implemented prefetching agent WebCompanion which employs a novel adaptive, fast, and selective online prefetching strategy based on estimated round trip times for Web resources. This strategy efficiently hides the access latencies for slow resources while at the same time limiting the network and server overhead and local resource consumption to moderate levels. Our extensive experiments show an average access speed-up of over 50% and an average network byte overhead of less than 150% using WebCompanion over a fast Internet connection. We measured a slight acceleration in accessing the Web through WebCompanion even in a pessimistic scenario where the user never requests a prefetched document.