An Energy Reward-Based Caching Mechanism for Information-Centric Internet of Things

Existing information-centric networking (ICN) designs for Internet of Things (IoT) mostly make caching decisions based on probability or content popularity. From the energy-efficient perspective, those strategies may not always be energy efficient in resource-constrained IoT because without considering the energy reward of caching decisions, inappropriate routers and content objects may be selected for caching, which may lead to negative energy rewards. In this paper, we analyze the energy consumption of content caching and content retrieval in resource-constrained IoT and calculate caching energy reward as a key metric to measure the energy efficiency of a caching decision. We then propose an efficient cache placement and cache replacement mechanism based on the caching energy reward to improve the energy efficiency of caching decisions. Through analysis and experimental results, we show that the proposed mechanism achieves a significant improvement in terms of energy efficiency, stretch ratio, and cache hit ratio compared to state-of-the-art caching schemes.