Evaluating Performance of Content Cache Placement in a Wireless Community Network

Community networks are often associated with bandwidth constraints. The limited bandwidth capacity in community networks results in higher content delivery time (latency) and reduces quality of service. Unplanned cache placement in the community networks has the potential to result in higher delays and increased network traffic. This study evaluates cache placement and content distribution in a community network using a distributed caching strategy. Latency, throughput and video performance measurements were carried out for geography, delay and hop count cache placement. In this study, hop count cache placement resulted in the lowest average latency, highest average throughput and best video performance. Overall, the study shows lower average latency, higher average throughput and better video performance at the caches compared to the main server. This reinforces the effectiveness of con- tent caching in improving network performance in wireless community networks