Smart data caching in archeological wireless applications: the PAST solution

Wireless computing, because of the limited memory capacity of the palmtops, forces one to separate data (stored on a remote server) from the application (running on the palmtops) that uses them. In applications working on data that frequently change, several kilobytes of data are exchanged between the server and the client palmtops. It is fairly evident that a similar tight coupling may easily saturate the network bandwidth when many palmtops are used in parallel, thus degrading the performances of the application running on it. The paper presents a way to reduce the waste of bandwidth by exploiting the palmtop memory to deal with data caching. The proposed smart data caching is based on context information. We have also applied our method and analyzed its features in a specific application: electronic guide to archeological sites in the PAST EC IT project.