Cache consistency in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Abstract

The production of cheap CMOS cameras, which are able to capture rich multimedia content, combined with the creation of low-power circuits, gave birth to what is called Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). WMSNs introduce several new research challenges, mainly related to mechanisms to deliver application-level Quality-of-Service (e.g., latency minimization). Such issues have almost completely been ignored in traditional WSNs, where the research focused on energy consumption minimization. Towards achieving this goal, the technique of cooperative caching multimedia content in sensor nodes can efficiently address the resource constraints, the variable channel capacity and the in-network processing challenges associated with WMSNs. The technological advances in gigabyte-storage flash memories make sensor caching to be the ideal solution for latency minimization. Though, with caching comes the issue of maintaining the freshness of cached contents. This article proposes a new cache consistency and replacement policy, called NICC, to address the cache consistency issues in a WMSN. The proposed policies recognize and exploit the mediator nodes that relay on the most "central" points in the sensor network so that they can forward messages with small latency. With the utilization of mediator nodes that lie between the source node and cache nodes, both push-based and pull-based strategies can be applied in order to minimize the query latency and the communication overhead. Simulation results attest that NICC outperforms the state-of-the-art cache consistency policy for MANETs. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.