Transient content caching and updating with modified harmony search for Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as one of the new use cases in the 5th Generation wireless networks. However, the transient nature of the data generated in IoT networks brings great challenges for content caching. In this paper, we study a joint content caching and updating strategy in IoT networks, taking both the energy consumption of the sensors and the freshness loss of the contents into account. In particular, we decide whether or not to cache the transient data and, if so, how often the servers should update their contents. We formulate this content caching and updating problem as a mixed 0–1 integer non-convex optimization programming, and devise a Harmony Search based content Caching and Updating (HSCU) algorithm, which is self-learning and derivative-free and hence stipulates no requirement on the relationship between the objective and variables. Finally, extensive simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in terms of the achieved satisfaction ratio for content delivery, normalized energy consumption, and overall network utility, by comparing it with some baseline algorithms.