A generalized target-driven cache replacement policy for mobile environments

Caching frequently accessed data items on the client side is an effective technique to improve system performance in a mobile environment. Due to cache size limitations, cache replacement algorithms are used to find a suitable subset of items for eviction from the cache. In this paper, we propose a generalized cost function for cache replacement algorithms for mobile environment. The distinctive feature of our cost function is that it is general and it can be used for various performance metrics by making the necessary changes. To demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the general cost function, we derive two specific functions to be evaluated by setting two different targets: minimizing the query delay and minimizing the downlink traffic. Detailed experiments are carried out to evaluate the proposed methodology. Compared to previous schemes, our algorithm significantly improves the performance in terms of query delay or in terms of bandwidth utilization depending on the targets.