An Efficient Cache Maintenance Scheme for Long Disconnected Mobile Clients
Kwangjin Park, MoonBae Song, Kang Sang-Won, Chong‐Sun Hwang · 2005
In the mobile computing environment, caching data at the client's side is a useful technique for improving the performance. For caching to be effective, the cache contents must be consistent with those stored in the server. That is, unfortunately, difficult to enforce due to the frequent disconnection and mobility of clients. In the literature, the basic approach adopted is for the sever to periodically broadcast invalidation reports(IRs) that contain information about objects that have been updated recently. However IR-based cache maintenance scheme has a main drawback. Any client who has been disconnected longer than w seconds has to discard all cached items even some of them may still be valid. In this paper, we propose two main schemes which can adapt clients' losing IR messages by long disconnection. First, the client sends its disconnection time when connection is re-established, and the server uses this information to decide the size of broadcast window w dynamically. Second, the server maintains IR messages for a given period of time and a client who has been disconnected longer than w seconds can verify its cache consistency individually. Compared to previous IR-based schemes, our schemes can significantly reduce cache missing and uplink request and improve the throughput by reducing response time.