Content aware multi-path forwarding strategy in Information Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) proposals rethink the communication model around named data, in contrast with the host-centric transport view of TCP/IP. The content retrieval in ICN is natively receiver-driven, chunk-level based, multi-path forwarding and intrinsically coupled with in-network caching. To make the best use of in-network caching resources, NDN router should acquire the view of the cache resources nearby for intelligent forwarding. In this paper, we tackle the problem of joint multi-path forwarding and the in-network caching in ICN for the first time. An effective local popularity statistic method is firstly provided to differentiate popular and unpopular content at intermediate nodes. Then we propose a dedicated multi-path forwarding strategy to perform dynamic packet-by-packet request scheduling according the content popularity. At last, a novel cache replacement scheme is presented to improve the utilization of in-network caching. The evaluation results through ndnSIM simulator show that the proposed multi-path forwarding strategy outperforms the existing schemes in both light and heavy traffic load situations in ICN.