An optimal sorting algorithm for mobile devices

Data sorting is an important procedure with many applications in computer science. Thus, various methods that improve the performance of sorting algorithms have been published. Most existing algorithms mainly aim to achieve a faster processing time for sorting and require memory space to load all data in the set. Such designs can be a burden for small devices that have relatively insufficient resources. This paper proposes a new sorting method for mobile devices that finds the minimum and maximum values by reading only a portion of the data into memory, unlike existing methods that read all data into memory. This phase is repeated as often as necessary in accordance with the size of the data set. The min/max values that are determined are written at the start and end point of the data set in storage. As the process is repeated, sorting can take place even if a small amount of memory is available, such as when using a mobile device. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we implemented a prototype for a music recommendation system, and we conducted comparative experiments with representative sorting methods. The results indicate that the proposed method consumed significantly less memory, and we confirmed the effectiveness and potentiality of the proposed method.