Security Aware Content Caching for Next Generation Communication Networks

Streaming services have become increasingly popular in recent years, causing an upsurge in video traffic. The continuing upsurge will put enormous stress on existing network infrastructures. This has motivated researchers to find innovative solutions to address this challenge. Proactive content caching at the network edge is considered one such innovative solution, which can reduce backhaul congestion during evening peak hours. Consequently, researchers have introduced numerous approaches to cache content at the network edge. While the focus so far is on reducing the congestion, security issues in relation to content breach at caching nodes have not been adequately addressed so far. Content storage units at the network edge are more vulnerable to malicious attacks, and the loss incurred in this process can be significant. In this paper, we introduce a security aware caching technique to reduce the amount of potential loss caused by security attacks. We investigate the trade-off between the savings achieved from the implementation of proactive caching at caching nodes and the probable loss caused by security attacks. We model the research question as an optimization problem, and provide an optimal solution, which selects the suitable content to be cached at the most suitable nodes so that the loss caused by content breach becomes marginal. Simulation results show that our proposed technique significantly minimizes the loss caused by security attacks.