• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.293-299
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• 2007

Intelligent pipeline inspection gauges (PIGs) are inspection vehicles that move along within a (gas or oil) pipeline and acquire signals (also called sensor data) from their surrounding rings of sensors. By analyzing the signals captured in intelligent PIGs, we can detect pipeline defects, such as holes and curvatures and other potential causes of gas explosions. There are two major data access patterns apparent when an analyzer accesses the pipeline signal data. The first is a sequential pattern where an analyst reads the sensor data one time only in a sequential fashion. The second is the repetitive pattern where an analyzer repeatedly reads the signal data within a fixed range; this is the dominant pattern in analyzing the signal data. The existing PIG software reads signal data directly from the server at every user#s request, requiring network transfer and disk access cost. It works well only for the sequential pattern, but not for the more dominant repetitive pattern. This problem becomes very serious in a client/server environment where several analysts analyze the signal data concurrently. To tackle this problem, we devise a fast in-memory cache manager, called T-Cache, by considering pipeline sensor data as multiple time-series data and by efficiently caching the time-series data at T-Cache. To the best of the authors# knowledge, this is the first research on caching pipeline signals on the client-side. We propose a new concept of the signal cache line as a caching unit, which is a set of time-series signal data for a fixed distance. We also provide the various data structures including smart cursors and algorithms used in T-Cache. Experimental results show that T-Cache performs much better for the repetitive pattern in terms of disk I/Os and the elapsed time. Even with the sequential pattern, T-Cache shows almost the same performance as a system that does not use any caching, indicating the caching overhead in T-Cache is negligible.