Monitoring access in advanced time zones to direct prefetching and so smooth access loads

Abstract

Network use tends to follow other human activities in terms of peaking during the day and evening, and being light in the early hours of the morning. This can lead to links that are bottlenecks during peak periods having excess capacity during the night. This paper shows how trends in access by users in advanced (eastern) times zones can be used to predict future access by users in delayed (western) time zones, and so identify which objects should be pre-fetched during the (western) night so that they are ready for access when users in the delayed time zone waken. This can smooth access loads on bottleneck links, and may be particularly useful to prevent trans-Pacific submarine cables becoming a bottleneck in connecting the Australian National Broadband Network to the rest of the Internet.