You might be interested in looking at Venkata Padmanabhan's MS
thesis from UC Berkeley, available as
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~padmanab/papers/masters-tr.ps
Venkat used a trace-based simulation to investigate the potential
performance of prefetching. Some of this work was done under my
supervision.
Apparently some people at Boston University have done similar work,
since their CS technical Reports page
http://cs-www.bu.edu/techreports/Home.html
lists
95-011
Azer Bestavros ; Carlos Cunha.
A Prefetching Protocol Using Client Speculation for the WWW,
May 8, 1995.
However, clicking on the link to this report yields: "Error 403
Forbidden - by rule" and I have not been able to obtain a copy.
-Jeff