A Heuristic Transferring Strategy for Heterogeneous-Cached ICN

The in-network caching is a considerably significant feature of Information-Centric Networking (ICN), especially the heterogeneous-cached ICN has been widely investigated since it accords with the actual network deployment. For the heterogeneous-cached ICN, although there have been many proposals to improve network performance, it is very difficult for these approaches to reach the optimal network performance with multiple metrics consideration. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a heuristic transferring strategy which selects some Content Routers (CRs) and combines them to facilitate the optimal network performance under a constrained total cache budget. At first, we quantify energy consumption, CR load, cache hit ratio and throughput, because the optimal network performance depends on four objects, i.e., minimizing energy consumption and CRs load as well as maximizing cache hit ratio and throughput. Then, based on the given network constraints and objects, we convert the CR transferring problem into 0-1 Knapsack Problem (KP01). Finally, in order to effectively obtain the optimal solution, we propose a heuristic approach based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and expectation efficiency to solve KP01. The simulation is driven by the real YouTube dataset from campus network measurement over GTS and Deltacom topologies, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed strategy is more efficient compared to three baselines.