A memory management architecture for a mobile computing environment

Abstract

In recent years, the rapid progress of hardware technology has enabled people to use mobile terminals away from the office or home with the use of cellular phones. However there are remaining issues such as the narrow bandwidth of wireless communications, limited battery duration of mobile terminals, etc. The paper proposes a common memory management mechanism for mobile terminals and servers called Memory Management Architecture for Mobile Computing Environment (MMM). MMM allocates a part of the memory of a mobile terminal and a part of the memory of a server as common memory and maintains consistency of the common memory areas. We evaluate MMM using sample application program models against traditional memory. The result shows that MMM can reduce wireless traffic to maintain consistency, and that, depending on the charge policy, a different prefetching scheme is efficient in minimizing communication cost.