Transient Data Caching Based on Maximum Entropy Actor–Critic in Internet-of-Things Networks

With the rapid development of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), a massive amount of transient data is transmitted in edge networks. Transient data are highly time-sensitive, such as monitoring data generated by industrial devices. Due to their inefficiency, traditional caching strategies in edge networks are inadequate for handling transient data. Thus, to improve the efficiency of transient data caching, we construct a freshness model of transient data and propose a maximum entropy Actor–Critic-based caching strategy, TD-MEAC-which can improve the freshness of cached data and reduce the long-term caching cost. Simulation results show that the proposed TD-MEAC achieves a higher cache hit rate and maintains a higher average freshness of cached transient data compared with the existing DRL and baseline caching strategies.