A cross layer interception and redirection cooperative caching scheme for MANETs

The caching paradigm has widely been used in computers, data bases and the Internet to reduce the response time of the applications and to reduce the traffic load in the computer buses or in the networks. These advantages can also be applied in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) as the caching paradigm could reduce the interferences due to the traffic overload and it could also increase the availability of the documents due to server disconnections. In this article, we propose a cooperative caching scheme for MANETs. The proposal is supported by the local cache that all the nodes in the MANET possess. In a collaborative way, a node could respond to the demand of other nodes if it is keeping a valid copy of the required document. As a novelty, the demands of the documents are not restricted to specific application messages but they are codified into the messages generated when the path to the server is being searched. In this way, the documents can be retrieved even when there is no route to the server. Furthermore, these expanded messages provide useful information about potential localizations of the documents. The proposed technique will use those additional location data to redirect the requests. By means of simulations, we have evaluated and compared our proposal to five other caching schemes as well as with the option of no caching. The obtained results indicate that our proposal outperforms the others in terms of document accessibility, delay and generated traffic load.