Cross-Layer Based Data Management in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Several protocols have been proposed to improve data accessibility in MANETs. Some of these proposals have adopted the cooperative caching scheme, allowing multiple mobile hosts within a neighborhood to cache and share data items in their local caches. Cross-layer optimization has not been fully exploited to further improve the performance of cooperative caching in these proposals. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based cooperative caching scheme which uses a cross-layer design approach and prefetching to further improve the performance of cooperative caching scheme. The cross-layer information is maintained in a separate data structure and is shared among network protocol layers. The performance evaluation was carried out in the NS-2 simulation environment and the results show that the proposed approach improves system performance.