Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Software Engineering,
Monash University, Australia. E-mail: {Agustinus.Borgy.Waluyo,
Bala.Srinivasan}@infotech.monash.edu.au | School of Business Systems, Monash University,
Australia. E-mail: [email protected]
Note: [] Corresponding author
Abstract: The emergence of mobile computing provides the ability to access
information at any time and place. However, as mobile computing environments
have inherent factors like power, storage, asymmetric communication cost, and
bandwidth limitations, efficient query processing and minimum query response
time are definitely of great interest. This survey groups a variety of query
optimization and processing mechanisms in mobile databases into two main
categories, namely: (i) query processing strategy, and (ii) caching
management strategy. Query processing includes both pull and push operations
(broadcast mechanisms). We further classify push operation into on-demand
broadcast and periodic broadcast. Push operation (on-demand broadcast) relates
to designing techniques that enable the server to accommodate multiple requests
so that the request can be processed efficiently. Push operation (periodic
broadcast) corresponds to data dissemination strategies. In this scheme,
several techniques to improve the query performance by broadcasting data to a
population of mobile users are described. A caching management strategy defines
a number of methods for maintaining cached data items in clients' local
storage. This strategy considers critical caching issues such as caching
granularity, caching coherence strategy and caching replacement policy.
Finally, this survey concludes with several open issues relating to mobile
query optimization and processing strategy.
Keywords: Mobile database, mobile computing, query optimisation and processing, data dissemination, data broadcasting, data caching, wireless database information retrieval
