Opportunities and Challenges for Caching and Prefetching on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Because demand for mobile data will outgrow the capacity of wireless networks for a long time, mobile applications should employ aggressive data caching and preloading to reduce the end users' data cost. This paper examines the algorithms that individual mobile applications can use for caching and preloading decisions, and proposes mechanisms for mobile operating systems to support such application-controlled caching and preloading. The paper ends with a call for data and tools to enable future research in the area.