Overhearing-aided data caching in wireless ad hoc networks

The wireless ad hoc network is a promising networking technology to provide users with various network services anywhere anytime. To cope with resource constraints of wireless ad hoc networks, data caching is widely used to efficiently reduce data access cost. In this paper, we propose an efficient data caching algorithm for wireless ad hoc networks which makes use of the overhearing property of wireless communication to improve caching performance. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless links, a packet can be overheard by a node within the transmission range of the transmitter, even if the node is not the intended target. Our proposed algorithm explores the overheard information, including data request and data reply, to optimize cache placement and cache discovery. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first data caching algorithm that considers the overhearing property of wireless communications for performance improvement. The simulation results show that, compared with existing work, our proposed algorithm can significantly reduce both message cost and access delay.