Optimized content caching and request capture in CNF networks

In order to meet the overwhelming demands of content retrieval for mobile end users, a novel architecture for the next-generation Internet called Cache-and-Forward (CNF) has been proposed to transport content as large packages in a hop by hop manner towards the destination, instead of transporting a stream of small packets along an established TCP/IP connection. In this paper, we investigate how CNF network architecture can be designed for efficient content retrieval for wireless mobile nodes. In particular, we look at Integrated Caching in which we assume each CNF router on the future Internet can cache contents that pass by and reply to content requests with its local copy. We name this content delivery method Cachingn-Capture (CC). We develop a mathematical model for CC to optimize the average content retrieval latency with limited storage on each CNF router. We propose Sequential Reassignment (SR) algorithm to solve the optimization problem. We compare the performance of the derived optimal solutions against our integrated caching and routing heuristics. The results show the Sequential Reassignment algorithm significantly reduces the average content retrieval latency by as high as 70%.