Performance analysis of location-dependent cache invalidation schemes for mobile environments

Mobile location-dependent information services are gaining increasing interest in both academic and industrial communities. In these services, data values depend on their locations. Caching frequently accessed data on mobile clients can help save wireless bandwidth and improve system performance. However, since client location changes constantly, location-dependent data may become obsolete not only due to updates performed on data items but also because of client movements across the network. To the best of the authors' knowledge, previous work on cache invalidation issues focused on data updates only. This paper considers data inconsistency caused by client movements and proposes three location-dependent cache invalidation schemes. The performance for the proposed schemes is investigated by both analytical study and simulation experiments in a scenario where temporal- and location-dependent updates coexist. Both analytical and experimental results show that, in most cases, the proposed methods substantially outperform the NSI scheme, which drops the entire cache contents when hand-off is performed.