An Efficient Buffer Management Scheme for Implementing a B-Tree on NAND Flash Memory

Abstract

Recently, NAND flash memory has been used for a storage device in various mobile computing devices such as MP3 players, mobile phones and laptops because of its shock-resistant, low-power consumption, and nonevolatile properties, However, due to the very distinct characteristics of flash memory, disk based systems and applications may result in severe performance degradation when directly adopting them on flash memory storage systems. Especially, when a B-tree is constructed, intensive overwrite operations may be caused by record inserting, deleting, and its reorganizing, This could result in severe performance degradation on NAND flash memory because of its distinct characteristics. In this paper, we propose an efficient buffer management scheme, called IBSF, which eliminates redundant index units in the index buffer and then delays the time that the index buffer is filled up. Consequently, IBSF significantly reduces the number of write operations to a flash memory when constructing a B-tree. We also show that IBSF yields a better performance on a flash memory by comparing it to the related technique called BFTL through various experiments.