Hybrid Cooperative Caching in a Mobile Environment

Abstract. Caching is a key technique for improving data access performance of mobile clients. The emergence of peer-to-peer communication technologies now brings to reality “cooperative caching ” in which mobile clients help one another in caching. They not only can retrieve data items from mobile support stations, but also from the cache in their peers. Traditional caching is based on an on-demand paradigm, where clients pull data to be cached. In this work, we also consider the use of the inherent broadcast mechanism from the mobile support station to complement on-demand pull-based access from the station and from peer mobile clients, to form the hybrid environment. The performance is evaluated for cooperative caching in these environments. Pull-based environments generally lead to lower access latency, while push-based and hybrid environments could effectively reduce power consumption