Reducing Bandwidth and Disk Space Requirement for Filesystems In Mobile Computing
Vijay Gupta, Roy Campbell · 1999
Currently, there is a substantial availability of low bandwidth wireless networks which can be used to enhance mobile computing. However, to get the same computing service as on the wireless networks, one needs greater bandwidths at reasonable prices. For the foreseeable future, wide-area wireless networks are not expected to have bandwidth comparable to wireline networks or become much cheaper. This necessitates software techniques to provide users of laptop computers with (i) quick response time, and (ii) quick consistency with the backbone network. The former has been addressed by research in optimistically replicated filesystems, while the latter problem is unsolved. This study substantially reduces the communication requirement needed to achieve quick consistency. As a result, wide area wireless networks and low bandwidth telephone modems can be used for achieving quick synchronization with the backbone network. Using trace-driven simulation and user-level implementation, a prelimi...