Prefetching and Caching for Minimizing Service Costs: Optimal and Approximation Strategies

In practice, prefetching data strategically has been used to improve caching performance. The idea is that data items can either be cached upon request (traditional approach) or prefetched into the cache before the requests actually occur. The caching and prefetching operations compete for the limited cache space, whose size is typically much smaller than the number of data items. A key challenge is to design an optimal prefetching and caching policy, assuming that the future requests can be predicted to a certain extent. This is a non-trivial challenge even under the idealized assumption that future requests are precisely known.