Peer-Based Collaborative Caching and Prefetching in Mobile Broadcast

Abstract

Caching and prefetching are two effective ways for mobile peers to improve access latency in mobile environments. With short-range communication such as IEEE 802.11 and Bluetooth, a mobile peer can communicate with neighboring peers and share cached or prefetched data objects. This kind of cooperation improves data availability and access latency. In this chapter the authors review several cooperative caching and prefetching schemes in a mobile environment that supports broadcasting. They present two schemes in detail: CPIX (Cooperative PIX) and ACP (Announcement-based Cooperative Prefetching). CPIX is suitable for mobile peers that have limited power and access the broadcast channel in a demand-driven fashion. ACP is designed for mobile peers that have sufficient power and prefetch from the broadcast channel. They both consider the data availability in local cache, neighbors’ cache, and on the broadcast channel. Moreover, these schemes are simple enough so that they do not incur much information exchange among peers and each peer can make autonomous caching and prefetching decisions.