Mobile file filtering

Abstract

The truly ubiquitous mobile computing requires that programs on mobile computers be able to continuously process as they can do on a distributed environment. This requests mobile file systems to provide solutions to weak data links and disconnected operations. This becomes important to utilise the limited bandwidths of wireless networks and reduce the probability of any voluntary disconnection which is caused by unacceptable delay of file accesses. In this paper, we propose two user-level dynamic filtering mechanisms, namely, inclusive and exclusive filters by which an adaptive volume is defined. Both filters aim to minimise the communication costs for managing the files that are not used by mobile users on their mobile computers. A simulation study was conducted to study the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive volumes, and we report our findings.