Spatial Hoarding: A Hoarding Strategy for Location-Dependent Systems

In a context-aware environment, the system must be able to refresh the answers to all pending queries in reaction to perpetual changes in the user’s context. This added to the fact that mobile systems suffer from problems like scarce bandwidth, low quality communication and frequent disconnections, leads to high delays before giving up to date answers to the user. A solution to reduce latency is to use hoarding techniques. We propose a hoarding policy particularly adapted for location-dependent information systems managing a huge amount of multimedia information and where no assumptions can be made about the future user’s location. We use the user’s position as a criterion for both hoarding and cache invalidation.