Interest-based cooperative caching in multi-hop wireless networks

New communication protocols, as WiFi Direct, are now available to enable efficient Device-to-Device (D2D) communications in wireless networks based on portable devices. At the same time, new network paradigms, as Content-Centric-Networking (CCN), allow a communication focused on the content and not its location within the network, enabling a flexible location for the content, which can be cached in the nodes across the network. In such context, we consider a multi-hop wireless network adopting CCN-like cooperative caching, in which each user terminal acts also as a caching node. We propose an interest-based insertion policy for the caching, based on the concept of “social-distance” borrowed by online recommendation systems, to improve the performance of the overall network of caches; the main idea is to store only the contents which appear to be of interest for the local user. We show that our proposed scheme outperforms other well-known insertion policies, that are oblivious of such social-distance, in terms of cache hit probability and access delays.