A Cache Invalidation Strategy Based on Publish/Subscribe for Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) aims to improve the efficiency of data delivery for the Internet. One of the typical characteristics of NDN is ubiquitous caching, that is to say, each network participant in NDN is capable of caching contents. This caching feature is beneficial for enhancing the data availability but also raises a problem of cache consistency. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy of cache invalidation, called PIOR (Proactive Invalidation with Optional Renewing), to provide strong consistency for NDN. PIOR is based on a lightweight publish/subscribe model, actively publishing the updated contents to the router nodes to guarantee the copy validity. We also conceive customized publish/subscribe rules to relieve the unbearable burden on the server imposed by the excessive publishing traffic. The advantage of PIOR lies in simple deployment and compatibility, since the invalidation process of PIOR is independent of the inherent process of NDN. We conduct extensive simulations over a real topology to evaluate the achievable performance of PIOR. The simulation results show that PIOR is able to achieve a high hit ratio and low server load at the low cost of network management.