Caching in Information-Centric Networking: From a content delivery path perspective

One of the defining characters of Information-Centric Networking(ICN) is in-network caching which enables content retrieval shift its emphasis from the exact content providers to the content that customers mostly care about. Undoubtedly, how to cache effectively is of primary concern in ICN. However, caching strategies such as Least Recently Used(LRU) are not tailored for the characteristics of content retrieval in ICN, thus compromising the capability of in-network storage. In this paper, we propose a new caching strategy called LUV-Path, in which all the routers along the delivery path will implicitly cooperate in deciding whether to cache the content and each content cached will be assigned a value that combines Least Unified Value(LUV) with router's distance from provider to reflect its relative importance. We evaluate LUV-Path with cache algorithms including LRU, FIFO under various network topology such as highly structured string and tree topologies and irregularly structured Abilene network. Our results suggest that LUV-Path significantly outperforms other caching strategies in reducing customer delay and network traffic as well as alleviating provider pressure across various network topologies with different structural property consistently.