Design and performance studies of an adaptive cache retrieval scheme in a mobile computing environment

In a mobile computing system, as users move to a new service area, the new server is usually considered to take over the execution of running programs for mobile users from the previous server so as to reduce the communication overhead of a mobile system. This procedure is referred to as service handoff. Note that when service handoff occurs, the new server will lose its advantage for cache access. To remedy this, we explore in this paper several cache retrieval schemes to improve the efficiency of cache retrieval. In particular, we analyze the impact of using a coordinator buffer to improve the overall performance of cache retrieval. Moreover, in light of the properties of transactions (i.e., temporal locality of data access among transactions), we devise a Dynamic and Adaptive cache Retrieval scheme (DAR) that can utilize proper cache methods according to some specific criteria to deal with the service handoff situation in a mobile computing environment. Performance of these cache retrieval schemes is analyzed and a system simulator is developed to validate our results. We devise a systematic procedure for determining the optimal operating points of DAR. Our experimental results show that by adaptively adopting the advantages of different cache retrieval methods, DAR significantly outperforms other schemes and is particularly effective for a mobile computing environment.