• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.29 no.12
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• pp.957-965
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• 2002

Garbage collection in the CLDC typically employs a stop-the-world GC algorithm which is performing a complete garbage collection when needed. This technique is unsuitable for the interactive Java embedded system because this can lead to long and unpredictable delays. In this paper, We present a garbage collection algorithm which reduces the average delay time and supports the interactive environment. Our garbage collector is composed of the allocator and the collector. The allocator determines the allocation position of free-list according to object size, and the collector uses an incremental mark-sweep algorithm. The garbage collector is called periodically by the thread scheduling policy and the allocator allocates the objects of marked state during collection cycle. Also, we introduce a color toggle mechanism that changes the meaning of the bit patterns at the end of the collection cycle. We compared the performance of our implementation with stop-the-world mark-sweep GC. The experimental results show that our algorithm reduces the average delay time and that it provides uniformly low response times.