Impact Assessment of Policy-Based Cache Management on Storage System Sustainability in Smart City Applications

The rapid growth of data in smart cities driven by interconnected systems like traffic monitoring, surveillance, and environmental sensing demands efficient and sustainable data management solutions. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of policy-based cache control on the performance and sustainability of the storage systems within smart city infrastructures. Synthetic workloads simulating urban data pattern were generated to evaluate system behavior under realistic conditions. Important performance metrics including cache-hit rate, latency, throughput, and energy consumption were analyzed across three different scenarios; namely, no cache, traditional LRU and proposed policy-based control. The findings show that the policy-based approach had an 85% cache hit rate, reduced latency to 70 ms, and improved throughput of 220 MB/s, while decreasing daily energy consumption of 95 kWh. These results shows clear benefits in both performances and energy efficiency. The study concludes that policy-based caching has a strong potential to enhance responsiveness of urban data infrastructure and sustainability. Its relevance to SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) lies in its ability to support intelligent and low-impact technological systems, which promote resilient and smart urban growth.