Hierarchical Cooperative Data Caching for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a promising technology for extending the Internet access to wider areas with high bandwidth. Cooperative caching is especially desirable for multi-hop wireless networks, including WMNs, to achieve efficient data access. Although quite a number of works have been done on data cooperative caching in wireless networks, WMN´s characteristic in network architecture necessitates the specially designed caching system. In this paper, we design the first cache cooperative caching system for WMN environments. A hierarchical cache system architecture is proposed, where each mesh access point acts as the coordinator of the client nodes inside the cell. Cache placement is conducted in the cell level and the network level respectively. Accordingly, we design two different placement metrics for different levels of placement decisions. Simulation results show that our algorithm performs much better than similar ones, in terms of both access delay and message cost.