Boosting User Experience via Foreground-Aware Cache Management in UFS Mobile Devices

Mobile devices today often have multiple applications running simultaneously in the background. These background applications could rapidly consume storage cache resources, thus degrading the performance of foreground applications as well as the user experience. This issue could get worse as modern mobile devices are employing universal flash storage (UFS), which supports faster transmission speed and full-duplex transmission. In this article, a foreground application-aware cache management approach, FOAM, is proposed to address this issue. Through adaptive management of storage cache resources with the awareness of I/O workload patterns, UFS device features, and foreground/background information, I/O performance of foreground application is significantly improved. Experimental results show that the proposed approach could boost the performance of foreground read I/O by 45.9%, foreground write I/O by 18.4% on average compared with the existing approach.