Eco-friendly Caching and Forwarding in Named Data Networking

Green networking, by making the network more energy efficient and helping reduce environmental impact, is receiving more and more attraction for sustainable ICT. In this paper, we propose a new green approach for Named Data Networking (NDN) where content requests and caching perform towards green content delivery. We design a forwarding and caching strategy, where we first define the greenness of nodes, a quantitative metric for measuring the environmental footprint of the network, based on which we identify corresponding green paths and encourage traffic to aggregate on green paths powered by more eco-friendly renewable energy. We validate our approach with a variety of simulations using real network topology and renewable energy datasets from the US, and the results show that applying the proposed green NDN achieves significant ecofriendly gains.