A Simulation study for evaluating the communication delay and the energy consumption in a mobile cooperative environment

The communication between mobile devices and fixed servers is not symmetrical. Mobile devices take longer and consume more energy when they send than when they receive messages. Collaborative applications make intensive use of communication in order to keep the consistency. A way to reduce not only the access time but also the energy consumption is caching the frequently accessed data in mobile clients. However, the task to determine whether the copy at the client's cache is consistent with the copy of the server can be an expensive. In this paper we analyze the access time and energy consumption through a new mechanism to deal with cache coherency in a mobile cooperative environment. We conduct our studies based on a simulation model.