Mobile Memory Management System Based on User’s Application Usage Patterns

Currently, the number of functions to improve user convenience in smartphone applications is increasing. In addition, more mobile applications are being loaded into mobile operating system memory for faster launches, thus increasing the memory requirements for smartphones. The memory used by applications in mobile operating systems is managed using software; allocated memory is freed up by either considering the usage state of the application or terminating the least recently used (LRU) application. As LRU-based memory management schemes do not consider the application launch frequency in a low memory situation, currently used mobile operating systems can lead to the termination of a frequently executed application, thereby increasing its relaunch time. This study proposes a memory management system that can efficiently utilize the main memory space by analyzing the application usage information. The proposed system reduces the application launch time by leaving the most frequently used or likely to be run applications in the main memory for as long as possible. The performance evaluation conducted utilizing actual smartphone usage records showed that the proposed memory management system increases the number of times the applications resume from the main memory compared with the conventional memory management system, and that the average application execution time is reduced by approximately 17%.