A survey of memory deduplication approaches for intelligent urban computing

Limited memory size is considered as a major bottleneck in data centers for intelligent urban computing. It is shown that there exist a large number of duplicated pages when various processes working with big data are hosted in data centers. Memory deduplication aims to automatically eliminate duplicate data in memory. It is an efficient technique to reduce memory requirement. In memory deduplication, pages with same content are detected and merged into a single copy. Recently, several system-level techniques have been proposed to address this issue, in which content-based page sharing (CBPS) is most widely used, since CBPS can be performed transparently in the hypervisor layer without any modification to guest operating systems of data center. In this paper, we survey several techniques for memory deduplication. We also classify these techniques based on their characteristics to highlight their similarities and differences. The aim of this paper is to provide insights to researchers into working of memory deduplication techniques and also to motivate them to propose better intelligent urban computing systems.