Collaborative Clustering for Cooperative Caching in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The major challenge in a mobile ad hoc network lies in providing data to the desiring mobile nodes as and when required. Caching tends to increase data availability in a wireless ad hoc environment. Caching if employed along with clustering can bring about significant benefits in terms of information availability and information retrieval in an ad hoc environment. Clustering is highly employed in MANETs to bind together network nodes into clusters. Here we propose a Collaborative Clustering approach for Cooperative Caching (4C) in a mobile ad hoc network which improves overall cache maintenance and decreases message exchange overhead. It also increases the rate at which data is retrieved by reducing access latency. In addition it intends to decrease heavy traffic near the data server. In this work, all the cluster nodes within a cluster cooperate for caching and all the cluster heads in the entire network collaborate for efficient cache maintenance. Moreover clients can opt for registration with its respective cluster heads to receive recent updates of the cached information. Data Server pushes updates to the registered clients through cluster heads.