76 Int. J. Knowledge and Web Intelligence, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2014 Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Web caching and prefetching with cyclic model analysis of web object sequences K.C. Srikantaiah*, N. Krishna Kumar and K.R. Venugopal Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore University, Bangalore, India E-mail: srikantaiahkc@gmail.com E-mail: krishnakumarn@live.com E-mail: venugopalkr@gmail.com *Corresponding author L.M. Patnaik Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India E-mail: patnaiklm@yahoo.com Abstract: Web caching is the process in which web objects are temporarily stored to reduce bandwidth consumption, server load and latency. Web prefetching is the process of fetching web objects from the server before they are actually requested by the client. Integration of caching and prefetching can be very beneficial as the two techniques can support each other. By implementing this integrated scheme in a client-side proxy, the perceived latency can be reduced for not one but many users. In this paper, we propose a new integrated caching and prefetching policy called the WCP-CMA which makes use of a profit-driven caching policy that takes into account the periodicity and cyclic behaviour of the web access sequences for deriving prefetching rules. Our experimental results have shown a 10%–15% increase in the hit ratios of the cached objects and 5%–10% decrease in delay compared to the existing scheme. Keywords: periodicity; sequential pattern analysis; web caching; web log; web prefetching. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Srikantaiah, K.C., Kumar, N.K., Venugopal, K.R. and Patnaik, L.M. (2014) ‘Web caching and prefetching with cyclic model analysis of web object sequences’, Int. J. Knowledge and Web Intelligence, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp.76–103. Biographical notes: K.C. Srikantaiah is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at S.J.B. Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India. He obtained his BE, ME and PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Bangalore University, Bangalore. His research interests are in the areas of data mining, web mining and semantic web.