Mitigating the gateway bottleneck via transparent cooperative caching in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been proposed to provide cheap, easily deployable and robust Internet access. The dominant Internet-access traffic from clients causes a congestion bottleneck around the gateway, which can significantly limit the throughput of the WMN clients in accessing the Internet. In this paper, we present MeshCache, a transparent caching system for WMNs that exploits the locality in client Internet-access traffic to mitigate the bottleneck effect at the gateway, thereby improving client-perceived performance. MeshCache leverages the fact that a WMN typically spans a small geographic area and hence mesh routers are easily over-provisioned with CPU, memory, and disk storage, and extends the individual wireless mesh routers in a WMN with built-in content caching functionality. It then performs cooperative caching among the wireless mesh routers. We explore two architecture designs for MeshCache: (1) caching at every client access mesh router upon file download,...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: ADHOC
• Authors: Saumitra M. Das, Himabindu Pucha, Y. Charlie Hu
• Keywords: ADHOC 2007, Caching, Routers, Wireless Mesh