A proposal of a memory management architecture for mobile computing environments

Mobile computing environments are being realized by the rapid popularization of cellular phones and the miniaturization and performance enhancement of mobile terminals. However, several technological issues are still a problem, such as the narrow bandwidth of wireless communications, the limited battery duration of mobile terminals, etc. Moreover, it is difficult to develop application programs that operate in mobile computing environments because of the complicated procedure of wireless communications. This paper proposes a common memory management mechanism for mobile terminals and servers called memory management architecture for mobile computing environments (MMM). MMM allocates part of the memory of a mobile terminal and part of the memory of a server as common memory while maintaining the consistency of common memory areas. MMM is evaluated using sample application program models against traditional memory. The result shows that MMM can reduce wireless traffic to maintain consistency, and that, depending on the different charging categories, a different prefetching scheme makes it more efficient in minimizing communication cost