Opportunistic off-path content discovery in information-centric networks

Recent research in Information-Centric Networks has considered various approaches for discovering content in the cache-enabled nodes of the network. Such approaches include scoped flooding and deploying a control plane protocol to disseminate the cache contents in the network, to name a few. In this work, we consider an opportunistic approach that uses trails left behind by data packets from the content origin to the sources in order to discover off-path cached content. We evaluate our approach using an ISP topology for various system parameters. We propose two new forwarding strategies built on top of our approach. Our results indicate that the opportunistic discovery mechanism can significantly increase cache hit rate compared to NDN's default forwarding strategy, while limiting the overhead at acceptable levels.