A Dynamic Cache Allocation Mechanism (DCAM) for Reliable Multicast in Information-Centric Networking

Abstract

As a new network architecture, information-centric networking (ICN) decouples the identifiers and locators of network entities and makes full use of in-network cache technology to improve the content distribution efficiency. For reliable multicast, ICN in-network cache can help reduce the loss recovery delay. However, with the development of applications and services, a multicast tree node often serves multiple reliable multicast groups. How to reasonably allocate cache resources for each multicast group will greatly affect the performance of reliable multicast. In order to improve the overall loss recovery performance of reliable multicast, this paper designs a dynamic cache allocation mechanism (DCAM). DCAM considers the packet loss probability, the node depth of the multicast tree, and the multicast transmission rate of multicast group, and then allocates cache space for multicast group based on the normalized cache quota weight. We also explore the performance of three cache allocation mechanisms (DCAM, AARM, and Equal) combined with four cache strategies (LCE, CAPC, Prob, and ProbCache), respectively. Experimental results show that DCAM can adjust cache allocation results in time according to network changes, and its combinations with various cache strategies outperform other combinations. Moreover, the combination of DCAM and CAPC can achieve optimal performance in loss recovery delay, cache hit ratio, transmission completion time, and overhead.