Location-aware cache replacement for mobile environments

Abstract

Traditional cache replacement policies rely on the temporal locality of users' access pattern to improve cache performance. These policies, however, are not ideal in supporting mobile clients. As mobile clients can move freely from one location to another, their access pattern not only exhibits temporal locality, but also exhibits spatial locality. In order to ensure efficient cache utilisation, it is important to take into consideration the location and movement direction of mobile clients when performing cache replacement. In this paper, we propose a mobility-aware cache replacement policy, called MARS, suitable for wireless environments. MARS takes into account important factors (e.g. client access rate, access probability, update probability and client location) in order to improve the effectiveness of on-board caching for mobile clients. Test results show that MARS consistently outperforms existing cache replacement policies and significantly improves mobile clients' cache hit ratio. © 2004 IEEE.