A context-aware cache structure for mobile computing environments

This paper proposes a cache management method that maintains a mobile terminal’s cache content by prefetching data items with maximum benefit and evicting cache data entries with minimum benefit. The data item benefit is evaluated based on the user’s query context which is defined as a set of constraints (predicates) that define both the movement pattern and the information context requested by the mobile user. A context-aware cache is formed and maintained using a set of neighboring locations (called the prime list) that are restricted by the validity of the data fetched from the server. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy, using different levels of granularity, can greatly improve system performance in terms of the cache hit ratio.