  Recently, the amount of running software on smart mobile devices is gradually
increasing due to the introduction of application stores. The application store
is a type of digital distribution platform for application software, which is
provided as a component of an operating system on a smartphone or tablet.
Mobile devices have limited memory capacity and, unlike server and desktop
systems, due to their mobility they do not have a memory slot that can expand
the memory capacity. Low memory killer (LMK) and out-of-memory killer (OOMK)
are widely used memory management solutions in mobile systems. They forcibly
terminate applications when the available physical memory becomes insufficient.
In addition, before the forced termination, the memory shortage incurs
thrashing and fragmentation, thus slowing down application performance.
Although the existing page reclamation mechanism is designed to secure
available memory, it could seriously degrade user responsiveness due to the
thrashing. Memory management is therefore still important especially in mobile
devices with small memory capacity. This paper presents a new memory
partitioning technique that resolves the deterioration of the existing
application life cycle induced by LMK and OOMK. It provides a completely
isolated virtual memory node at the operating system level. Evaluation results
demonstrate that the proposed method improves application execution time under
memory shortage, compared with methods in previous studies.
