Exploiting In-Zone Broadcasts for Cache Sharing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The problem of cache sharing for supporting data access in mobile ad hoc networks is studied in this paper. The key to this problem is to discover a requested data item in an efficient manner. In the paper, we propose two caching protocols, IXP and DPIP, which distinguish themselves from the existing ones in that they fully exploit in-zone broadcasts to facilitate cache sharing operation. In particular, the DPIP protocol offers an implicit index push property, which is highly useful for enhancing cache hit ratio in the neighborhood of a data requester node. Moreover, our protocols also exploit the broadcasts to facilitate the design of a simple but efficient count-based cache replacement scheme. Performance study shows that the proposed protocols can significantly improve the performance of data access in a mobile ad hoc network.