Improving the storage performance of smartphones through journaling in non-volatile memory

According to the recent studies on the smartphone performance analysis, the primary performance bottleneck of smartphones is storage systems rather than wireless networks or processors. The key reason behind this undesirable result is the journaling function of a lightweight database library used by various smartphone applications. This paper quantifies the overhead of journaling on the performance of smartphones and presents a novel storage architecture that eliminates this overhead by using nonvolatile memory technologies. Specifically, the proposed architecture adopts a new journaling scheme that provides high storage performance of smartphones without any loss of reliability. The prototype of the proposed architecture has been implemented on the mobile platform based on Linux. Measurement studies with smartphone benchmarks show that the proposed journaling architecture improves the storage performance by 20-278% compared to original journaling. Performance studies with real applications such as internet games, video players, and web browsers also show that the performance improvement is in the range of 23-69%.