An Overview to Pre-fetching Techniques for Content Caching of Mobile Applications

Abstract

The Internet and web have been the main resource for various types of information for majority of people in the world since a decade ago. With the emerging of smartphone technology, the web content is also available for mobile users that connect to the Internet through cellular network. Although mobile users are able to access content from the web; nevertheless, they always experience long access latency due to the speed of the network. Many research and developments have been implemented to help users to access content faster when using mobile devices with cellular network. Caching is one of them; a commonly used method for storing recently-accessed contents so that they can be used in the future. Content caching (CC) can reduce latency, which in return guarantees faster access to the content. Recently, there is a growing interest among researchers and developers in studying a more proactive technique to improve CC called pre-fetching (PF). PF is a method that caches selected content before it is actually needed. By embedding PF in CC, it is believed that latency could be reduced significantly. By looking at this promising approach, this paper introduces the PF techniques that could be suitable for CC in mobile environment. The paper aims to assist researchers by providing a better understanding on the existing PF techniques so that improvements can be proposed where possible.