Speeding-up Cache Lookups in Wireless Ad-Hoc Routing using Bloom Filters

On demand routing protocols that exploit local caches have received a lot of attention lately in wireless ad-hoc networking. In this paper, we specifically address cache management, an issue that has been a main source of criticism for the applicability of such protocols. In particular, we tackle the problem of accessing the cache content efficiently. To this end, we propose summarizing the cache content so that we achieve efficient lookups. This not only saves both the restrictive resources of the wireless devices such as computational power and energy but also improves the overall protocol performance. We use Bloom filters as summaries. Our experimental results using the ns simulator show that both resource savings and performance improvements are attained when such filters are integrated within the DSR protocol which is one the most widely used instance of an on demand protocol.