On energy efficient wireless data access: Caching or not?

We consider a typical wireless data access scenario: a number of mobile clients are interested in a set of data items kept at a common server. A client sends a request to inform the server of its desired data item while the server replies in the common broadcast channel. To study the energy consumption characteristics in such a scenario, we first define a power aware utility function. Based on the utility function, we propose a novel wireless data access scheme, which is a non-cooperative game - wireless data access (WDA) game. Although it does not rely on client caching (without-cache), our theoretical analysis shows that it is not always necessary for clients to send requests to the server. Simulation results confirm that our proposed scheme, compared with a simple always-request one, increases both the utility and lifetime of every client while reducing the number of requests sent, at the cost of slightly larger average query delay.