A Scalable Asynchronous Cache Consistency Scheme (SACCS) for mobile environments

Abstract

In the literature, there exit two types of cache consistency maintenance algorithms for mobile computing environments: stateless and stateful. In a stateless approach, the server is unaware of the cache contents at a mobile user (MU). Even though stateless approaches employ simple database management schemes, they lack scalability and ability to support user disconnectedness and mobility. On the other hand, a stateful approach is scalable for large database systems at the cost of nontrivial overhead due to server database management. We propose a novel algorithm, called Scalable Asynchronous Cache Consistency Scheme (SACCS), which inherits the positive features of both stateless and stateful approaches. SACCS provides a weak cache consistency for unreliable communication (e.g., wireless mobile) environments with small stale cache hit probability. It is also a highly scalable algorithm with minimum database management overhead. The properties are accomplished through the use of flag bits at the server cache (SC) and MU cache (MUC), an identifier (ID) in MUC for each entry after its invalidation, and estimated time-to-live (TTL) for each cached entry, as well as rendering of all valid entries of MUC to uncertain state when an MU wakes up. The stale cache hit probability is analyzed and also simulated under the Rayleigh fading model of error-prone wireless channels. Comprehensive simulation results show that the performance of SACCS is superior to those of other existing stateful and stateless algorithms in both single and multicell mobile environments.