FOCAL: Forwarding and Caching with Latency Awareness in Information-Centric Networking

Latency minimization is an important network optimization criterion which becomes an even more compelling feature in 5G networks. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) appears a promising candidate technology for building an agile communication model that reduces latency via a fully distributed and adaptive delivery approach coupling in-network caching and forwarding. In the paper, we investigate the role of latency awareness on ICN delivery performance and introduce FOCAL, an approach combining novel caching and forwarding strategies to jointly reduce end-user experienced latency with no network signaling nor coordination between routers. FOCAL gathers a latency-proportional probabilistic caching policy, with a load-aware dynamic forwarding strategy, that preferentially routes popular content requests through a single path (set of caches), while globally achieving minimum network load and user content delivery time, thus delay minimization. By means of ICN simulations, we assess the superiority of FOCAL over existing alternatives given by the combinations of known caching policies and forwarding strategies: It results a reduced end-user delivery performance coupled with faster convergence to average/variance figure and higher self-adaptiveness to varying traffic/network conditions.