Adaptive caching and refreshing in mobile databases

The mobile computing environment is receiving increasing attention recently. We consider a mobile environment in which a collection of mobile clients accesses a stationary database server via a wireless channel. Due to the limited bandwidth of a wireless channel and the instability of the wireless network, caching of frequently accessed data items in a client's local storage becomes especially important for improving the performance and data availability of data access queries. In this paper, we discuss the limitations of existing caching mechanisms in a mobile environment and investigate issues that need to be addressed. We propose an adaptive caching model that could cope with the nature of a mobile environment and the low-bandwidth wireless media, supporting fast data access. We describe the adaptive cache replacement and refresh mechanisms; explain the implementation in the context of object-oriented databases; and illustrate the results of some exploratory experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of the mechanisms.