A Hybrid ICN Caching Strategy Based on Region Division

Abstract

Information-centric Networking (ICN) has become a promising paradigm towards the future Internet. In-network caching is one of its prominent features. Existing cache schemes roughly group into deterministic caching and probabilistic caching. However, most current studies tend to employ a sole caching strategy throughout the entire network, which is hard to meet both users' and ISPs' demands. We propose a hybrid caching strategy (HCache), which uses different caching methods in different regions and combine their merits. Specifically, the cache network is divided into the core and edge areas. The edge areas apply deterministic caching to reduce access delay from user's angle, while the core area utilizes probabilistic caching to enrich the cache diversity and reduce inter-domain traffic from ISP's angle. Simulations indicate HCache outperforms traditional probabilistic and deterministic caching schemes in terms of access delay, cache hit ratio and bandwidth savings. Moreover, HCache is efficient in content delivery and friendly to both users and ISPs.