Network driven cache behavior in wireless sensor networks

It is becoming increasingly apparent that approaches and methodologies traditionally used in on-chip and off-chip cache memories can offer significant benefits to a wide range of wireless network scenarios. A prominent relative area is Wireless Sensor Networks characterized by a wide range of advantages but, at the same time, extremely limited and scarce resources. However, most of the relative efforts presented so far do not consider the unique conditions and respective challenges imposed by wireless communication medium even more in industrial environments. This paper presents our initial study in developing cross-layer approaches among MAC layer and cache management in three axis: (i) adaptive cache invalidation technique, (ii) application and network driven cache replacement techniques and (iii) adaptive cache prefetching techniques. Additionally, simulation based performance evaluation is presented revealing promising results regarding resource conservation due to the use of proposed methodologies in wireless networks of limited resources.