Understanding storage I/O behaviors of mobile applications

In the past few years, mobile devices quickly gained high popularity in our daily life. Designed for ultra-mobility, these small yet powerful devices are fundamentally distinct from traditional computer systems (e.g., PCs and servers) - from the internal hardware architecture and software stack, to application behaviors. Storage, the slowest component in the I/O stack, plays an important role in mobile systems and can greatly affect user experience. In this paper, we present a set of comprehensive experimental studies on mobile storage and attempt to gain insight on the unique behaviors of mobile applications and characterize the performance properties of underlying mobile storage. In our experiments, we carefully selected 13 representative mobile workloads from 5 different categories. Our studies reveal several unexpected observations on mobile storage. Based on these findings, we further discuss the associated implications to mobile systems and application designers. We hope this work can inspire system architects, application designers, and practitioners to pay specific attention to the high-latency I/O operations, rather than completely relying on the default APIs. We also suggest a further look to new opportunities, such as adopting a faster medium in the mobile system architecture, for future research.