A thin storage architecture for wireless

Wireless devices have reduced storage. Hence networked storage is preferred for wireless devices. Wireless devices also have small form factor and bandwidth limitations. Hence the usage patterns of wireless devices are different. In particular, wireless devices are used mainly for getting brief critical information and for storing documents for future use. Current networked storage techniques - network attached storage and storage area network - do not provide these services. In this paper we propose a wireless network file system (WNFS) which provides storage redirection and associative access. WNFS also integrates several ideas like location management, prefetching, etc. To provide efficiency, the proposed system includes some application level processing leading to the notion of storage proxy.