Efficient Cache Consistency Management for Transient IoT Data in Content-Centric Networking

Since Internet of Things (IoT) communications can enjoy many advantages brought by content-centric networking (CCN) in nature, there is an increasing interest on their integration for better information retrieval and distribution. Nevertheless, different from the conventional multimedia traffic of which contents are hardly changed, IoT data are always transient and updated by their producers according to the actual situation. As a result, if without any effective countermeasures, outdated copies are inevitably stored by CCN routers and then distributed to the associated consumers, degrading both caching efficiency and user experience. In fact, most of related policies take little account of information freshness for cached contents, and how to tackle transient IoT data in CCN is still an ignored but crucial issue required for further explorations. Therefore, in this article, we propose an efficient popularity-based cache consistency management scheme, which aims to guarantee freshness of IoT data returned by on-path routers and avoid heavy signalling costs introduced at the same time. Extensive simulations were performed under both real-world scare-free and binary-tree topologies, and corresponding results have proved the efficiency of the proposed scheme in timely evictions of outdated IoT data stored by CCN in-network caching.