EABC: Energy-aware Centrality-based Caching for Named Data Networking in the IoT

Named Data Networking (NDN) is an information-centric internet architecture that delivers packets based on the name of the content in the packet. A key component of NDN is the caching strategy designed to reduce total network latency and load on content producers. To improve the speed and reliability of web content delivery, existing caching strategies typically cache content on a large number of intermediate nodes, which incur significant energy consumption and memory overhead. However, in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, memory and energy of nodes are scarce resources. Therefore, in NDN-based IoT applications, traditional caching strategies can cause node failures due to energy depletion, which can significantly reduce the network operational lifetime as well as create problems that caching is supposed to solve. In this paper, a caching strategy based on node centrality and energy availability, called Energy-aware Approximate Betweenness Centrality (EABC) is proposed for NDN-based IoT. EABC uses a topology-based heuristic to cache data content on nodes with high centrality and makes caching decisions based on the remaining energy of the nodes. We evaluate EABC using simulations based on ndnSIM in different topologies and compare it with several existing NDN caching strategies. The results show that EABC performs better in different types of network topologies, reduces the average transmission delay of data and balances the energy consumption of highly central nodes, thus extending the network lifetime.