Advanced Perceptive Forwarding in Content-Centric Networks

As the promising communication architecture for future networks, the content-centric network (CCN) is still facing many challenges. In CCNs, it is difficult to discover temporary content replicas spreading in routers' caches based on the routing information provided by proactive routing protocols. This paper proposes an advanced perceptive forwarding strategy (APFS), which adaptively perceives closer temporary content replicas to respond the users' requests quickly. A data structure, called a chunk map (CM), is designed and is included into a data packet to indicate the availability of the content replicas in the cache of a closer router. The routers that have received the CM seem to perceive the closer content replicas so that they would intelligently forward the users' requests to the closer routers that cache the requested content replicas. Moreover, a new policy, called early start with punishment, is put forward to guarantee the adaptability of the CM probing and an improved cache replacement policy is employed to extend the validity duration of the CM. The simulation result shows that our APFS scheme has the noticeable performance in terms of the download delay and the average bandwidth.