Improving energy efficiency in information-centric mobile ad-hoc networks using places of interest while respecting privacy

Abstract

The fact that network users mostly look for content regardless of its location has led to the creation of information-centric networks with NDN (named data networking project) as the most famous instance. NDN can be implemented in any type of network including MANET (mobile ad-hoc network) which can be easily created among a collection of smartphones. The first step for content retrieval in NDN is propagating interest packets which has a dramatic effect on energy consumption because of wireless communications. Methods have been devised for limiting the amount of packet propagation. But they are not appropriate for smartphones either because they require multiple WiFi interfaces which is not available in usual smartphones or because they require the exact position of nodes which conflicts privacy. In our proposed approach, a single WiFi interface is used, and mobile nodes will share only an imprecise version of their current and their predicted next location, which complies much better with privacy. Using this information, the amount of interest and data packets will decrease of more than 15%. When location information is spread through the network, this reduction will be almost doubled. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.