Performance evaluation of an optimal cache replacement policy for wireless data dissemination

Data caching at mobile clients is an important technique for improving the performance of wireless data dissemination systems. However, variable data sizes, data updates, limited client resources, and frequent client disconnections make cache management a challenge. We propose a gain-based cache replacement policy, Min-SAUD, for wireless data dissemination when cache consistency must be enforced before a cached item is used. Min-SAUD considers several factors that affect cache performance, namely, access probability, update frequency, data size, retrieval delay, and cache validation cost. The paper employs stretch as the major performance metric since it accounts for the data service time and, thus, is fair when items have different sizes. We prove that Min-SAUD achieves optimal stretch under some standard assumptions. Moreover, a series of simulation experiments have been conducted to thoroughly evaluate the performance of Min-SAUD under various system configurations. The simulation results show that, in most cases, the Min-SAUD replacement policy substantially outperforms two existing policies, namely, LRU and SAIU.