Opportunities and Challenges for Caching and Prefetching on Mobile Devices

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.