Some enhanced cache replacement policies for reducing power in mobile devices

Abstract

Developing widely useful mobile computing applications presents difficult challenges. On one hand, mobile users demand fast response times, and deep relevant content. On the other hand, mobile devices have limited storage, power and communication resources. Caching frequently accessed data items on the mobile client is an effective technique to improve the system performance in mobile environment. Due to cache size limitation, the choice of cache replacement technique to find a suitable subset of items for eviction from cache becomes important. Power consumption and lookup latency both are crucial factors of performance in embedded systems. One important decision in designing hierarchical memories is selection of cache replacement policies. In this paper, we firstly explain briefly some of the available and used replacement policies in modern cache structures. Then we propose some improved replacement policies and evaluate their performance. We show that, taking the dirty blocks into account in cache policy will reduce the average power consumption by some percents.