Energy-efficient caching and prefetching with data consistency in mobile distributed systems

Summary form only given. In mobile distributed systems, vital resources like battery power and wireless channel bandwidth impose significant challenges in ubiquitous information access. We propose a novel energy and bandwidth efficient data caching mechanism, called greedydual least utility (GD-LU), that enhances dynamic data availability while maintaining consistency. The proposed utility-based caching mechanism considers several characteristics of mobile distributed systems, such as connection-disconnection, mobility handoff, data update and user request patterns to achieve significant energy savings in mobile devices. Based on the utility function derived from an analytical model, we propose a cache replacement algorithm and a passive prefetching algorithm to cache and prefetch data objects. Our comprehensive simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed mechanism achieves more than 10% energy saving and near-optimal performance tradeoff between access latency and energy consumption.