High performance, low complexity cooperative caching for Wireless Sensor Networks

During the last decade, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged and matured at such point that currently support several applications like environment control, intelligent buildings, target tracking in battlefields, and many more. The vast majority of these applications require an optimization to the communication among the sensors so as to serve data in short latency and with minimal energy consumption. Cooperative data caching has been proposed as an effective and efficient technique to achieve these goals concurrently. The essence of these protocols is the selection of the sensor nodes which will take special roles in running the caching and request forwarding decisions. This article introduces a new metric to aid in the selection of such nodes. Based on this metric, we propose a new cooperative caching protocol, which is compared against the state-of-the-art competing protocols. The simulation results attest the superiority of the proposed protocol; the proposed solution achieves on the average 20% improvement w.r.t. the competing method for the examined performance measures.