An Efficient Routing Strategy for Information Centric Networks

Information Centric Network (ICN) focuses on shifting the current architecture of internet from host oriented to data oriented. It emphasizes on the location of contents rather than producer of the same. ICN accomplishes it's objectives by supporting caching of content at internal nodes in the network. It also focuses on proper routing of content requests towards a suitable data source for efficient and timely delivery. Hence, routing and caching are two prominent areas of research in ICN. In this paper, a dynamic routing mechanism is proposed that utilizes the concept of likelihood time and betweenness centrality. In order to improve content retrieval latency, the content requests are routed to the nearest content locations, determined by the likelihood time of requested content and betweenness centrality of a node in the network. The routing strategy of the proposed scheme extends native Dijkstra's algorithm and works with the available caching mechanism. The performance of the proposed strategy is evaluated through exhaustive simulations in ndnSIM-2.0, which is a ns-3 driven NDN simulator. The observed simulation results depict that in realistically simulated network topology, the new protocol shows 5-8% of performance improvement over existing ICN routing strategy in terms of cache hit ratio, latency and packet overhead.