Energy-Efficient Cooperative Caching for Information-Centric Wireless Sensor Networking

Although information-centric networking (ICN) can boost the performance of sensor data delivery in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), its energy efficiency may be significantly impaired due to the receiver-driven request-response transmission model. ICN sensors have to keep long-time active mode to wait for the requests that may arrive at any time, resulting nontrivial energy waste for energy-constrained WSNs. An intuitive method to conserve energy is to schedule partial nodes to fall asleep, but at the cost of extra data fetching delay. In this work, we investigate multihop cooperative caching for green WSN over receiver-driven ICNs. By leveraging regional caches, not only can the energy be saved, but also the data fetching delay can be reduced. We formulate those two cooperation gains and capture the tradeoff between energy saving and delay reduction. Based on the optimal tradeoff, we present a solution of scoped multihop cooperative caching and elaborate a green cooperation policy for each sensor to determine its operation scope and conduct a proper cooperation decision. Our simulation results show that our proposed multihop cooperative caching can save more than 91.0% energy and achieve 28.9% delay reduction than the basic ICWSN, and also reduce 60.2% energy consumption than the existing cooperative caching schemes.