Cache management for mobile databases: design and evaluation

Communication between mobile clients and database servers in a mobile computing environment is via wireless channels with low bandwidth and low reliability. A mobile client could cache its frequently accessed database items into its local storage in order to improve performance of database queries and availability of database items for query processing during disconnection. We describe a mobile caching mechanism for a mobile environment utilizing point to point communication paradigm. In particular, we investigate issues on caching granularity, coherence strategy, and replacement policy of mobile caching. Via a detailed simulation model, we compare our proposed caching mechanism with conventional ones and discover that our mobile caching mechanism outperforms conventional ones in most situations.