An Adaptive Cooperative Caching Strategy (ACCS) for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Data caching can remarkably improve the data availability in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) by reducing the access latency and bandwidth usage. Unfortunately, due to mobility and resource constraints, caching techniques designed for wired network are not applicable to MANETs. Moreover, frequent data updates, limited Mobile Terminal's (MT's) resources, insufficient wireless bandwidth and MT's mobility make cache management a tedious task. However, as MTs in MANETs may have similar tasks and share common interests, cooperative caching, which allows the sharing and coordination of cached data among multiple MTs, can be used to reduce the bandwidth and power consumption. Hence, a nearby MT can serve requests instead of the distant data source. The originality of this paper is concentrated on introducing an Adaptive Cooperative Caching Strategy (ACCS) with a novel cache replacement and prefetching policies. ACCS divides the network into non-overlapping clusters. Unlike other caching techniques that employ reactive routing protocols, ACCS employs a novel built-in table driven routing strategy with no additional penalties. Such behavior significantly minimizing the query delay. The secret lies in collecting the routing information during the clusters formulation, then fill the routing tables accordingly. ACCS has been compared against recent cooperative caching strategies. Experimental results have shown that ACCS outperforms other strategies as it introduced the maximum cache hit as well as the minimum query latency.