On the Effectiveness of Diffusive Content Caching in Content-Centric Networking

Recently, data-centric networking is getting increased attention. A representative example of data-centric networking is Content-Centric Networking (CCN), which routes packets within a network based on their content identifiers. In CCN, each CCN router on a network reuses data by caching relayed contents. Specifically, the CCN router caches a copy of the content in its buffer memory. However, in CCN, routers on the path from a user to the source cache contents. A CCN router cannot use contents cached by neighboring CCN routers unless the neighboring CCN routers are on the path to the source. In this paper, we propose Diffusive Content Caching (DCC), which improves the efficiency of buffer memory usage by advertising information of contents cached by a CCN router to neighboring CCN routers. Hence, with DCC, the CCN router can forward a request packet to any of neighboring CCN routers, which cache the corresponding contents using the standard CCN routing mechanism. We also evaluate the effectiveness of DCC by simulations. Our simulation results show that DCC reduces the average contents delivery time by approximately 8 % on average.