A cooperative game theoretic approach for data replication in mobile ad-hoc networks

The mobile computing environment provides many benefits such as ubiquitous access to computing but include constraints on resources such as: available bandwidth and battery life. Replication is a widely recognized method for balancing the demands of storage space with bandwidth and battery life. We propose a novel scheme that seeks to strategically balance these constrained resources through a cooperative game-theoretic approach for replication in a mobile environment. Our replication strategy relies on the cooperation of the nodes within the network to make replica caching decisions which are spatiotemporally local-optimal for the network from an energy and bandwidth conservation standpoint. In cooperative altruistic data replication, CADR, each node calculates the net global benefit, NGB, for caching a replica of the requested data, as the result data is returned from the responding node to the requesting node, where it is then determines the spatiotemporally local-optimal node for replicating the data item. Performance results from our research indicate that our scheme, CADR, improves the query response time by 25% and 45%, mean hop count is improved by 26% and 46%, query error is reduced by 30% and 48%, while energy utilization is reduced 30% and 57% when compared with both another game theoretic replication approach and standard cooperative caching respectively.