Detecting Energy-Efficient Central Nodes for Cooperative Caching in Wireless Sensor Networks

The deployment of wireless sensor networks in many application areas like environment control, target tracking in battlefields, requires an optimization to the communication among the sensors so as to serve data in short latency and with minimal energy consumption. Cooperative data caching has been proposed as an effective and efficient technique to achieve these goals concurrently. The design of protocols for such networks depends mainly on the selection of the sensors which will take special roles in coordinating the procedure of caching and take forwarding decisions. This article introduces a new metric to aid in the selection of such nodes. Based on this metric, we propose a new energy efficient cooperative caching protocol, which is compared against the state-of-the-art competing protocol. The simulation results attest the superiority of the proposed protocol.