Integrated Caching and Routing Strategy for Information-Centric Networks

Abstract

Besides Off-path caching in Information Centric Networking (ICN), On-path caching is an integrated caching solution with-in an Autonomous System's (AS) local network. However, it is seen that in On-path caching, the content is cached en-route in the reverse path towards the Interest generator. Thus, local Rendezvous Network (RENE)[29] /Name Resolution System (NRS) [15] (in routing through name resolution) or FIB [2] (in name-based routing) is not conscious of the cached data. As a result the most extensively deployed intra-domain routing protocol and their forwarding strategy is not capable of addressing all available temporary cached copies of content. This leads on-path caching strategy to experience from two major downsides: numerous replicas of same content within AS which do not add significant value in terms of cache resource utilization and a trial taken to minimize redundancy ends up with the cost of fetching more copy of similar content from the repository (i.e., the closest cache copy is unknown/not enroute). In this paper we introduce an integrated caching and forwarding solution which minimizes the caching redundancy and maximizes the probability of finding nearby cached content, which causes utilization of available cache resources of AS‟s as a whole to be productive. We propose novel concepts of naming the content router and caching the content‟s cache-route to address the issue. We leverage Name Data Networking (NDN) node architecture and its forwarding plane/strategy (of routing) to attain our goal. Mathematical analysis to determine load balance and cache hit ratio, and simulation results considering average hop-distance and server hit ratio authenticate the efficiency of our proposed scheme.