The Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm envisions billions of devices all connected to the Internet, generating low-rate monitoring and measurement data to be delivered to application servers or end-users. Recently, the possibility of applying innetwork data caching techniques to IoT traffic flows has been discussed in research forums. The main challenge as opposed to the typically cached content at routers, e.g. multimedia files, is that IoT data are transient and therefore require different caching policies. In fact, the emerging location-based services can also benefit from new caching techniques that are specifically designed for small transient data. This paper studies in-network caching of transient data at content routers, considering a key temporal data property: data item lifetime. An analytical model that captures the trade-off between multihop communication costs and data item freshness is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that caching transient data is a promising information-centric networking technique that can reduce the distance between content requesters and the location in the network where the content is fetched from. To the best of our knowledge, this is a pioneering research work aiming to systematically analyse the feasibility and benefit of using Internet routers to cache transient data generated by IoT applications.
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