Computer Science Seminar Series
Caching for Wireless Data Access
February 19, 3:00pm
Weir Hall, Room 235
Presenter: Dr. Hui Chen
Faculty Candidate
In a distributed caching system, data items stored at remote servers are accessed through clients equipped with caches. A data update makes the corresponding cached data item invalid and the subsequent cache hit on the data item becomes useless when strong consistency policy is required. In this talk, I will present part of my studies on distributed cache access algorithms and cache replacement policies by using wireless data access as an example. Compared with its wired counterparts, wireless networks have several limitations, e.g., 1) channel bandwidth in wireless networks is narrower than that in wired networks; 2) mobile wireless nodes have limited battery power. Therefore, the goal for wireless caching is to reduce wireless bandwidth usage and client power consumption. We observed that a cache hit at wireless clients could be more costly in terms of wireless bandwidth usage than a cache miss if the data item is invalid due to updates on the data item. We proposed update-based cache access algorithms and replacement policies whose design and analysis are not only based on heuristic intuitions, but also rich of theoretical foundation. They provide us deep insights into system behaviors which heuristic or simulation approaches alone cannot achieve. Analysis and extensive simulations show advantages of the proposed caching schemes.
Dr. Hui Chen is a geophysicist turned computer science researcher and a software development practitioner. He spent years in studying geophysics, especially, computational problems in geophysics, which kindled his initial interest and passion for computer science and software development. In 2006, he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Memphis, where he taught/assisted undergraduate/graduate courses and published more than 20 journal and peer-reviewed conference papers including 6 IEEE Transactions papers. His primary research interests are at areas of computer system and networking as well as applied computing. He is currently concentrating his research on design and analysis of personal communication service systems, wireless LANs, wireless sensor networks, mobile/wireless distributed systems, and cache systems for wireless systems. He is/was a Technical Program Committee member for several international conferences, such as the International Wireless Communication and Mobile Computing Conference 2007 and the International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications 2005. He is serving a guest editor of journal special issue Wireless Telemedicine and Applications of EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking. He works for AutoZone, Inc., as a computer programmer since August 2005. He is a member of the IEEE and the ACM.
Dr. Chen is a faculty candidate in the Department of Computer and Information Science.