Asymptotic Analysis of Inhomogeneous Information-Centric Wireless Networks With Infrastructure Support

Abstract

The information-centric networking (ICN) is a promising and significant approach towards the host-to-content interaction. Motivated by the fact that nodes are inhomogeneously distributed to a certain extent in wireless networks, e.g., the distribution of vehicles exhibits cluster phenomenon in some bustling places of urban areas, we study the impacts of inhomogeneous node distribution and local node cooperation on information-centric wireless networks with infrastructure support. The distribution of nodes is assumed to be inhomogeneous as a multiclustering topology. The base stations are assumed to have access to all the contents, which are requested following a popularity distribution. We propose a scheme where each node retrieves the requested content from other nodes or base stations. Based on the number of clusters and that of base stations, we divide the network topology into two cases, i.e., the cluster-dense case and cluster-sparse case, and evaluate the corresponding throughput and delay performance. Finally, under the Zipf's law for content popularity distribution, we investigate the optimal caching problem in the two cases, and obtain the optimized throughput and delay performance.