Online Caching and Cooperative Forwarding in Information Centric Networking

Information centric networking is one of the most promising future Internet architectures to tackle the increasing network traffic by enabling in-network caching to cache popular contents. Although in-network caching reduces the network traffic by providing requested content locally to the users, several challenging issues are still unsolved. For example, identical contents are replicated in all routers along each request's forwarding path, which incurs faster cache replacement and degrades cache utilization, and temporally cached content's locations are not easy to track or search in the network. Besides, it is tough to correctly predict future popularity of contents and decide which contents to store. Hence, in this paper, an online caching and cooperative forwarding scheme is proposed to enhance cache utilization and to reduce network delay, as well as reduce the workload on each router. The caching problem is formulated as a Ski-Rental problem, which is a classical method for online decision making, in combination with consistent-hashing to obtain an online coordinated caching solution. The proposed request forwarding scheme is based on consistent-hashing, where every router knows the potential location of the cached copy of the requested content and thereby avoiding the unnecessary forwarding. Finally, the proposed request forwarding and caching schemes were validated by a chunk-level simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of content hit rate, server load, the processing load on routers, and access delay.