Analyzing information availability in ICN under link failures

Information-Centric Networks (ICNs) facilitate in-network caching, which has amongst others the advantage of providing higher information availability than traditional IP networks. This property is very beneficial in a variety of scenarios, ranging from node mobility to network disruptions and failures. However, a clear understanding of the extent to which information in ICNs remains available to the users in those scenarios as well as the impact of different ICN design choices (e.g. caching strategy and caching capacity) and network characteristics (e.g. topology) is currently lacking in literature. In order to fill this gap, we have developed an analytical model to study the information availability in ICNs when network disruptions occur. In particular, this model allows us to compute the probability that, under the occurrence of link failures, users are still able to retrieve the information they are interested in. The accuracy of our analytical model is demonstrated by comparing its results with results obtained by detailed simulations. These experiments also showed that, regarding the required computation time, our analytical model is considerably faster than simulation. The power of the analytical model is illustrated through many numerical examples on the information availability in ICNs under various link failure conditions, for different in-network caching strategies.