Abstract
Mobile computing is a new emerging computing paradigm posing many challenging data management problems. It refers to the environment where tens of millions of users will use various palmtop and laptop computers, connected by wireless connections to the fixed network. It is anticipated that such an infrastructure will be created in the near future. There are many problems caused by the mobile computing environment which need to be solved. In order to provide more powerful functions in the wireless environment, we put our effort on the data management challenges. In this thesis, we focus on deriving the condition of data replication and a cache replacement policy. The main goal of data replication is to reduce the network traffic generated by massive queries and to speed up the query processing; that is, we try to make it possible to get the needed data from the local agents to process the queries. We also propose a cache replication policy to manage the replicated data. Further, we present eight query strategies, simulate their behaviors according to five query types and other factors of the wireless environment, and discuss the simulation results.