Web access patterns enhancing data access performance of cooperative caching in IMANETs

In an IMANET, mobile users access both text and media web contents on the Internet through gateway nodes, with web access patterns, i.e., the Zipf-like distribution or the Stretched Exponential distribution. To reduce data access delay from the Internet, we consider the cache placement problem in cooperative caching, which is that each mobile node selects a subset of web contents to cache cooperatively in its limited cache so that total access cost is minimized. It has been proved NP-hard. We propose a solution named Adaptive Allocation Cooperative Caching (AACC), which adaptively divides the cache space of each node into two components: altruistic and selfish, according to detected data access patterns. AACC aims to find the optimal cache allocation solution to allocate appropriate cache spaces for two components in order to minimize total access cost. Given the Zipf-like access distribution, we find a near-optimal allocation solution to the cache placement problem. Simulation results show that AACC achieves much better performance than the existing best cooperative caching strategy in IMANETs in terms of average query delay, caching overheads, and query success ratio. In particular, AACC reduces caching overheads by 40% in average.