A constructive review of in-network caching: A core functionality of ICN

Over the years, caching has been leveraged (and established) as an add-on functionality to enhance network performance. However, Information Centric Networking (ICN) conceives caching at network layer (i.e. beyond the premise of end-to-end principle) thereby making it one of the core functionalities. Further, ICN advocates named-content (another core functionality) that allows content-consciousness within networks. Together the two functionalities result in content-aware ubiquitous in-network caching that has received significant attention of researcher all-around. The aim of this paper is to probe in depth and review some of the work done pertaining to in-network caching in ICN, in order to understand their aims, assumptions, approaches, simulation set-ups used, network topologies exploited, traffic pattern fed-in, performance metrics used, parameter(s) tuned-in to optimize the performance and the significance of the results obtained by the researchers. The paper also lists out advantages of in-network caching, related issues, factors that affect in-network caching and relevant performance metrics. The paper intends to assist researchers who are searching ways to put-forward (an acceptable) proof of their ideas.