Prototyping a prefetching scheme for location-dependent systems

Advances in wireless networks, mobile devices and location tracking mechanisms are making location-aware applications more and more popular. While several prefetching schemes were proposed for mobile systems, very few ones exist for location-dependent applications and at the best of our knowledge, there is no work describing implementation details of a prefetching scheme for location-dependent systems. In this paper, after a brief survey of information hoarding and prefetching mechanisms, we deduce some requirements for a successful prefetching scheme for location-aware applications, we show that the prefetching policy we previously proposed satisfies these requirements, and we describe a prototype implementing this policy. We describe the system architecture and detailed algorithms describing the tasks executed in the client and the server. We also discuss some additional steps that can be useful for saving energy consumption in the mobile device. An adequate data structure allows the server to have continuously an up to date image of the client´s cache content