Energy-efficient caching for wireless mobile computing

Abstract

Caching can reduce the bandwidth requirement in a mobile computing environment. However, due to battery power limitations, a wireless mobile computer may often be forced to operate in a doze or even totally disconnected mode. As a result, the mobile computer may miss some cache invalidation reports broadcasted by a server, forcing it to discard the entire cache contents after waking up. In this paper, we present an energy-efficient cache invalidation method, called GCORE, that allows a mobile computer to operate in a disconnected mode to save battery while still retaining most of the caching benefits after a reconnection. We present an efficient implementation of GCORE and conduct simulations to evaluate its caching effectiveness. The results show that GCORE can substantially improve mobile caching by reducing the communication bandwidth (or energy consumption) for query processing.