Supporting cooperative caching in ad hoc networks

Most researches in ad hoc networks focus on routing and not much work has been done on data access. A common technique used to improve the performance of data access is caching. Cooperative caching, which allows the sharing and coordination of cached data among multiple nodes, can further explore the potential of the caching techniques. Due to mobility and resource constraints of ad hoc networks, cooperative caching techniques designed for wired networks may not be applicable to ad hoc networks. In this paper, we design and evaluate cooperative caching techniques to efficiently support data access in ad hoc networks. We first propose two schemes: CacheData, which caches the data, and CachePath, which caches the data path. After analyzing the performance of those two schemes, we propose a hybrid approach (HybridCache), which can further improve the performance by taking advantage of CacheData and CachePath while avoiding their weaknesses. Cache replacement policies are also studied to further improve the performance. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes can significantly reduce the query delay and message complexity when compared to other caching schemes.