A Long Endurance Policy (LEP): An Improved Swap Aware Garbage Collection For NAND Flash Memory Used As A Swap Space In Electronic Devices

-Flash memory has more capacity and less weight. It makes it more suitable for electronic media. Electronics such as tablet PC and smart phones use NAND flash memory as a secondary storage because it has many attractive features such as small size, fas t access speeds, and light weight. However, it has shown limited success in its battle against the hard disk, due to intrinsic weak points of: erase-before-rewrite and limited program/erase cycles. Electronics with NAND flash memory uses a “swapping mechanism” to extend a limited main memory space. However, if the electronic devices use flash memory as swap space, it should perform garbage collection, which is a time consuming operation. Therefore, in order to manage swap space efficiently along with minimizing the weak points, this work presents a novel policy that improves the lifetime and provides efficient garbage collection for those devices. The proposed policy has three features important in NAND flash memory based swap systems: (1) long endurance of flash memory, (2) quick garbage collection time, and (3) low energy consumption. Index terms – Electronic devices, flash translation layer, garbage collection, NAND flash memory, Swapping, swap space, wear-leveling.