Effects of cache mechanism on wireless data access

Abstract

In wireless data transmission, the capacity of wireless links is typically limited. Since many applications exhibit temporal locality for data access, the cache mechanism can be built in a wireless terminal to effectively reduce the data access time. This paper studies the cache performance of the wireless terminal by considering a business-card application. We investigate the least-recently used replacement policy and two strongly consistent data access algorithms called poll-each-read and callback. An analytic model is proposed to derive the effective hit ratio of data access, which is used to validate against simulation experiments. Our study reports how the data access rate and the data update distribution affect the cache performance in a wireless terminal.