Information-Centric Wireless Sensor Networking Scheme with Water-Depth-Awareness Content Caching for Underwater IoT

The existing Underwater Internet of Things (UIoT) is based on the IP architecture, which is not conducive to the efficient storage and distribution of huge amounts of content generated in underwater. Actively pushing all content to users causes much unnecessary resource consumption in the UIoT. The information-centric networking (ICN) architecture opens new horizons up for these challenges. However, the slowness of underwater propagation speed makes traditional ICN not suitable for UIoT, especially considering about delay time. In this article, we propose an information-centric wireless sensor networking scheme with water-depth-aware content caching (ICWSN-WDA) to solve the above challenges. First, we design a naming scheme and a hybrid communication mode suitable for ICWSN-WDA. The communication mode in underwater we design is divided into push and pull traffic, which balances energy consumption and delay time. Second, we define a push level to decide which water depth the content actively pushes to, finding a suitable junction point of two modes. Third, as the water depth is deeper, it becomes more difficult to replace the sensor battery. To save energy consumption of deep-water sensors, the water-depth-aware caching mechanism is proposed based on water depth, popularity, and senor energy. Our extensive evaluation confirms the effectiveness of our proposed scheme, and it balances energy consumption constraints and latency.