A user-aware prefetching mechanism for video streaming

The randomly and unpredictable user behaviors during a multimedia presentation may cause the long retrieval latency in the client-server connection. To accommodate the above problem, we propose a prefetching scheme that using the association rules from the data mining technique. The data mining technique can provide some priority information such as the support, confidence, and association rules which can be utilized for prefetching continuous media. Thus, using the data mining technique, the proposed prefetching policy can predict user behaviors and evaluate segments that may be accessed in near future. The proposed prefetching scheme was implemented and tested on synthetic data to estimate its effectiveness. Performance experiments show that the proposed prefetching scheme is effective in improving the latency reduction, even for small cache sizes.