FlexFetch: A History-Aware Scheme for I/O Energy Saving in Mobile Computing

Extension of battery lifetime has always been a major issue for mobile computing. While more and more data are involved in mobile computing, energy consumption caused by I/O operations becomes increasingly large. In a pervasive computing environment, the requested data can be stored both on the local disk of a mobile computer by using the hoarding technique, and on the remote server, where data are accessible via wireless communication. Based on the current operational states of local disk (active or standby), the amount of data to be requested (small or large), and currently available wireless bandwidth (strong or weak reception), data access source can be adaptively selected to achieve maximum energy reduction. To this end, we propose a profile-based I/O management scheme, FlexFetch, that is aware of access history and adaptive to current access environment. Our simulation experiments driven by real-life traces demonstrate that the scheme can significantly reduce energy consumption in a mobile computer compared with existing representative schemes.