A Demand-based Caching Method for Garbage Collection in Flash-Memory Embedded Systems

NAND flash memory has been used for the data storage of mobile devices, Laptops, and various embedded systems, but requires a garbage collection mechanism due to its erase-before-write characteristic. Garbage collection consists of a series of activities (such as read, write, and erase operations) that usually degrade the lifetime and the performance of NAND-based storage systems. In this paper, we propose a demand-based caching method for garbage collection in flash-memory embedded systems. The experimental results show that the proposed method can cache a small part of appropriate information about garbage collection in RAM-limited embedded systems and the performance is still reasonable.