Scheduling Reads and Writes for a Weakly Connected Mobile Environment

File access is a fundamental requirement of any computing environment, and mobile users expect their file service needs to be met just like any other user. Through clientside caching and careful network management, it is possible to provide acceptable performance in a mobile environment for both read requests and write updates, even with a low-bandwidth (or weak) connection. Trace-driven simulation is used to study the performance implications of sharing a weak network connection between read and write traffic. The performance of both conservative and aggressive write-back policies is investigated, as are the resource implications of each type of policy. The performance implications of delaying write backs in a mobile environment are also examined. Keywords: mobile computing, network file systems, caching 1 Introduction The recent growth in the availability of local and wide-area wireless networks, and in the capabilities of notebook computers, has made it possible for mobile clients ..