A strategy to manage cache consistency in a disconnected distributed environment

Modern distributed systems involving large number of nonstationary clients (mobile hosts, MH) connected via unreliable few-bandwidth communication cha nnels are very prone to frequent disconnections. This disconnection may occ ur because of different reasons: The clients may voluntarily switch off (to save battery power), or a client may be involuntarily disconnected due to its own movement in a mobile network (hand-off, wireless link failures, etc .). A mobile computing environment is characterized by slow wireless links and relatively underprivileged hosts with limited battery powers. Still, wh en 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. The nature of the physical medium coupled with the fact that disconnection s from the network are very frequent in mobile computing environments deman d a cache invalidation strategy with minimum possible overheads. In this pa per, we present a new cache maintenance scheme, called AS. The objective of the proposed scheme is to minimize the overhead for the MHs to validate th eir cache upon reconnection, to allow stateless servers, and to minimize th e bandwidth requirement. The general approach is 1) to use asynchronous inv alidation messages and 2) to buffer invalidation messages from servers at t he MH's Home Location Cache (HLC) while the MH is disconnected from the net work and redeliver these invalidation messages to the MH when it gets recon nected to the network. Use of asynchronous invalidation messages minimizes access latency, buffering of invalidation messages minimizes the overhead o f validating MH's cache after each disconnection and use of HLC off-loads t he overhead of maintaining state of MH's cache from the servers. The MH can be disconnected from the server either voluntarily or involuntarily. We ca pture the effects of both by using a single parameter s: The percentage of time a mobile host is disconnected from the network. We demonstrate the eff icacy of our scheme through simulation and performance modeling. In particu lar, we show that the average data access latency and the number of uplink requests by a MH decrease by using the proposed strategy at the cost of usi ng buffer space at the HLC. We provide analytical comparison between our pr oposed scheme and the existing scheme for cache management in a mobile envi ronment [4]. Extensive experimental results are provided to compare the sch emes in terms of performance metrics like latency, number of up[ink request s, etc., under both a high and a low rate of change of data at servers for various Values of the parameter a. A mathematical model for the scheme is d eveloped which matches closely with the simulation results.