Energy-Aware Floating Service and Cooperative Caching for Mobile IoT Networks

Mobile Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications increasingly demand low-latency service delivery and efficient content dissemination, yet conventional cloud-centric solutions often suffer from excessive backhaul delay.We present an energy-aware floating architecture that enables peer-assisted edge computing and cooperative content caching across mobile IoT devices. The framework comprises three key components: (i) Floating Service, where selected user nodes temporarily act as local servers and adapt in real time to node mobility to sustain seamless service provisioning; (ii) Cooperative Caching, which supports dynamic, proximity-based content exchange among neighboring devices; and (iii) a mobility-aware service-migration predictor that forecasts user movement to guide timely service handover and cache preloading. A radio duty-cycle energy model records transmit, receive, and idle activity to estimate device-side power expenditure. Extensive simulations show that the proposed system reduces end-to-end latency by up to 87.5% for more than 90% of service requests, while the cooperative caching component lowers retrieval delay by up to 58.1% for 28% of communications. Crucially, the floating mechanism increases the average device radio duty cycle by only 1–3 percentage points, corresponding to an incremental power cost of just 3.6–24.6 mW per node. These results underscore the practicality of energy-aware, peer-assisted edge collaboration for next-generation mobile IoT deployments.