In this paper, we have developed an additional enhancement to the HTTP protocol. This modification eliminates the need for the client to wait for the delivery of the HTML file before being able to request the embedded objects. In our solution, the server delivers the embedded objects of a web page to the client without being explicitly requested. In essence, the requests for the embedded objects are generated by the server instead of by the client. We introduced, in the form of a module for Apache HTTP Server, a mechanism for preloading web page from server to client. The client web browser is able to receive this modified response through the use of a custom built proxy.

The purpose of this work is to reduce the delivery time for the initial portion of multimedia objects over HTTP protocol. The multimedia files we consider are those embedded in web pages. By prefetching embedded media from server to client, we are able to overcome the effects of network latency.We implement prefetching in a custom built HTTP server capable of anticipating future requests from the client, and delivering data without it explicitly being requested. To allow the client to receive files not requested, we use a custom built proxy, to run on the client system. Our custom server and proxy implement modifications to the HTTP protocol to allow multiple files to be delivered in a single transmission.

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Due to the increase of the number of web pages consisting of multimedia embedded objects in recent years, finding a suitable model for the web pages including multimedia files has become an important issue for efficient catching and web page delivery time.Our characterization shows the existence of a few media objects embedded in the popular web pages that contain mostly image and text object. Also this characterization shows despite of existence of a few embedded media objects, web pages sizes are still small and the server can prefetch them efficiently in a proxy cache. Thus by prefetching the embedded objects of a web page containing a media object, we are able to reduce the delivery time for the initial portion of the multimedia object as well as the total down load time of the web page. We have developed a custom web server and a proxy cache to implement this idea. This paper shows the achieved improvement.