People |
A fundamental challenge for many mobile computing applications is
data management. Data should be available anywhere at
anytime. However, this task is particularly difficult to support with
respect to managing a user's personal data (e.g., data files, email,
and cached web pages) across a collection of personal devices (e.g.,
a laptop, PDA, and mobile phone). Two properties of the mobile
environment make data management particularly challenging: network
disconnection and device resource constraints, particularly energy
constraints. The goal of this work is to provide maximal availability
and consistency of personal data as well as maximal aggregate device
lifetime for a collection of personal devices. To accomplish this
goal, the project develops a set of cooperative prefetching
algorithms that enable devices to retrieve relevant data when
connected to the information source. Further, the algorithms
efficiently distribute the energy burden of performing prefetching
across the collection of devices. The evaluation investigates the
performance of the algorithms in an implementation running on a
collection of laptop computers and iPAQs. Two primary metrics are
considered: the aggregate lifetime of the devices and the hit rate of
user requests for data. The overarching impacts of this work will be
improved usability of mobile devices and applications and
maximization of mobile device lifetime.
Supported by NSF grant CNS-0509095. |