SMaC: Spatial Map Caching Technique for Mobile Devices

Applications for Location-based Services (LBS) are becoming more and more popular. However, the continuous access to the wireless internet to get map tiles from servers can significantly affect the quality of the user experience, or might be too expensive. In this paper, we present SMaC, Spatial Map Caching, a caching technique devised for storing map tiles on the secondary memory of mobile devices. Differently from classical caching techniques, such as LRU, SMaC is based on the spatial locality principle that characterizes the way maps are shown to moving users.