Cooperative Caching in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) presents a constrained communication environment due to fundamental limitations of client's resources, insufficient wireless bandwidth and users' frequent mobility. MANETs have many distinct characteristics which distinguish them from other wireless networks. Due to frequent network disconnection, data availability is lower than traditional wired networks. Cooperative caching helps MANETs in alleviating the situation of non availability of data. In this paper, the authors present a scheme called global cluster cooperation (GCC) for caching in mobile ad hoc networks. In this scheme, network topology is partitioned into non-overlapping clusters based on the physical network proximity. This approach fully exploits the pull mechanism to facilitate cache sharing in a MANET. Simulation experiments show that GCC mechanism achieves significant improvements in cache hit ratio and average query latency in comparison with other caching strategies.