To Do or Not to Do: Metadata-Guided Query Evaluation in Content Caching Networks

To support emerging pervasive computer applications, efficient data access and information sharing is essential in mobile wireless environments. The data-centric storage approach provides energy-efficient data dissemination and organization. However, wireless devices have limited storage and are energy-constrained. To address these issues, we introduce the concept of content caching networks, in which the collected data will be stored by its content in a distributed manner, while the data in the network is cached for a certain period of time before it is sent to a centralized storage space for backup. Further, we propose the metadata-guided query evaluation approach to achieve query efficiency in content caching networks. Our clustering and compression based algorithm for metadata construction helps to minimize the information loss due to data compression, while achieving the memory requirements on wireless devices. We present both theoretical and empirical results to show that our metadata-guided approach is highly effective to perform efficient data queries, and thus demonstrate the feasibility of the content caching networks.