Exploiting Clustering and Cross-Layer Design Approaches for Data Caching in MANETs

In this paper we propose a cluster-based cooperative caching scheme for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). We also adopt a prefetching scheme to complement the caching scheme. A cross-layer design approach is employed to further improve the performance of cooperative caching and prefetching schemes. Cross-layer information is shared among network protocol layers. The effect of network size and the Time-To-Live value on network performance was investigated using simulation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves caching performance in terms of data accessibility, query delay and query distance compared to the caching scheme that does not adopt the cooperative caching strategy.