A weighted cache replacement policy for location dependent data in mobile environments

Abstract

Developing widely useful mobile computing applications presents difficult challenges. On one hand, mobile users demand intuitive user interfaces, fast response times, and deep relevant content. On the other hand, mobile devices have limited processing, storage, power, display, and communication resources. Caching frequently accessed data items on the mobile client is an effective technique to improve the system performance in mobile environment. Due to cache size limitation, the choice of cache replacement technique to find a suitable subset of items for eviction from cache becomes important. In this paper, we propose a new cache replacement policy for location dependent data in mobile environment. The proposed policy selects the predicted region based on client's movement and uses it to calculate the weighted data distance of an item. This makes the policy adaptive to client's movement pattern and provides importance to the regions around client's position. This is unlike earlier policies that consider the directional/non-directional data distance only. We call our policy the Weighted Predicted Region based Cache Replacement Policy (WPRRP). Simulation results show that the proposed policy significantly improves the system performance in comparison to previous schemes in terms of cache hit ratio.