A CLUSTERING BASED WEB PRE-FETCHING IN HIGH TRAFFIC ENVIRONMENT

ABSTRACT

The continued increase in demand for objects on the Internet causes high web traffic and consequently low user response time which is one of the major bottleneck in the network world. Increase in bandwidth is a possible solution to the problem but it involves increasing economic cost. An alternative solution is web prefetching. Web prefetching is the process of predicting and fetching web pages in advance by proxy server before a request is sent by a user. Prefetching is performed during the server idle time. Most literature based on the classical prefetch algorithm assumes that the server idle time is large enough to prefetch all user’s predicted requests which is not true in a real life situation. This research aims at improving the web prefetching technique by developing a prefetching technique that can be effective in a high traffic environment when the server idle time is very low.Log files were collected and preprocessed for several client group within a domain. The preprocessed log files were used to create web navigation graph, which shows the transition from one web page to another web page.Support and confidence threshold were used to remove web pages with values less than the threshold values. Several clusters were formed in a particular client group. When the prefetch time is predicted to be too small to prefetch, the entire clusters formed from various domains will be used to create a prioritized cluster based on several user request. The model was evaluated based on hit rate, byte rate, precision, accuracy of prediction and usefulness of prediction. The result shows that the proposed Web Clustering algorithm performs better than the classical prefetch technique when the server idle time is small and behaves same as the classical algorithm as the server time becomes large enough to prefetch all users predictions.