An Efficient Traffic-aware Caching Mechanism For Information-centric Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a traffic-aware caching mechanism (TCM) for resource-constrained nodes in information-centric WSNs. TCM pushes up popular upstream content objects to be cached nearby the sink. Less popular content objects are cached farther from the sink compared to popular content objects. TCM also pushes down popular downstream content objects to be cached inside the network. The objective of TCM is to reduce the number of interest messages required forwarding in multiple hops inside WSNs to optimize stretch ratio, energy efficiency, and content retrieval latency. We implement TCM on the top of existing popularity-based caching schemes to improve their performance. Through analysis and experimental results, we show that TCM achieves a significant improvement in terms of energy efficiency, content retrieval latency, cache hit ratio, and stretch ratio compared to state-of-the-art popularity-based caching schemes.