Content-Aware Routing based on Cached Content Prediction in Satellite Networks

As a promising complement to terrestrial cellular networks, such as 5G/6G, satellite networks have recently drawn increasing attention. However, facing the challenges of the rapidly increasing users' demand for multimedia content, how to achieve efficient data delivery in a dynamic environment becomes a critical but knotty problem. To provide an efficient solution from the routing perspective, in this paper, we consider the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architecture and propose a content-aware routing scheme. The basic idea of the proposed routing scheme is to leverage the cached content on cache-enabled satellites and find the optimal route solution with maximum net-gains, i.e., how much delay is reduced. Considering the limitation of periodical signaling collection in satellite networks, we also design a cached content prediction model, which can infer the probability that a certain content could be cached according to the content's historical popularity information, to provide necessary information to measure net-gains. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed content-aware routing scheme outperforms the traditional routing scheme with a 20% reduction in terms of content retrieval delay and traffic consumption.