Distributed maintenance of cache freshness in opportunistic mobile networks

Opportunistic mobile networks consist of personal mobile devices which are intermittently connected with each other. Data access can be provided to these devices via cooperative caching without support from the cellular network infrastructure, but only limited research has been done on maintaining the freshness of cached data which may be refreshed periodically and is subject to expiration. In this paper, we propose a scheme to efficiently maintain cache freshness. Our basic idea is to let each caching node be only responsible for refreshing a specific set of caching nodes, so as to maintain cache freshness in a distributed and hierarchical manner. Probabilistic replication methods are also proposed to analytically ensure that the freshness requirements of cached data are satisfied. Extensive trace-driven simulations show that our scheme significantly improves cache freshness, and hence ensures the validity of data access provided to mobile users.