iCache: An Intelligent Caching Scheme for Dynamic Network Environments in ICN-Based IoT Networks

Advanced network technologies and ubiquitous connected devices are boosting the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) at an unprecedented pace. However, as most of the connected IoT devices are battery powered, the energy consumption issue has become the bottleneck of the IoT’s development. Caching is a promising approach to reducing the energy consumption of the battery-powered devices since the requested data packets can be retrieved from intermediate nodes in the network, e.g., routers, instead of from the remote battery-powered IoT devices, which allows the IoT devices to spend more time in the sleep mode. To realize in-network caching and overcome the IP-based networks’ inefficiency support for IoT, building IoT over information-centric networking (ICN) is a promising approach advocated by researchers. However, existing works in this area assume the network environments are static, which hinders the development of existing approaches in the real dynamic network environments. In this article, we leverage the deep
$Q$
-networks (DQNs) to propose an intelligent caching scheme (named as iCache) that can automatically adjust the caching nodes’ caching parameters to make caching decisions for the dynamic network environments. Extensive evaluations were conducted and the results show that the proposed iCache outperforms the existing approaches in terms of the total energy consumption (e.g., more than 29% reduction compared to the caching transient data (CTD) caching scheme) and the average number of hops (e.g., more than 20% reduction compared to the CTD caching scheme).