A Strategy to Manage Cache Consistency in a Distributed Mobile Wireless Environment

Overview

Mobile computing environments are characterized by slow wireless links and relatively underprivileged hosts with limited battery powers, predisposed to frequent disconnections. Caching data at the Mobile Hosts (MHs) in a wireless network helps alleviate problems associated with slow, limited bandwidth wireless links, by reducing latency and conserving bandwidth. Battery power is conserved by reducing the number of up-link requests. A mobile computing environment is a distributed system, thus when data at the server changes, the client hosts must be made aware of this fact in order for them to invalidate their cache otherwise the host would continue to answer queries with the cached values returning incorrect data.