Cache the Queues: Caching and Forwarding in ICN from a Congestion Control Perspective

Abstract

Caching and multipath forwarding are essential ingredients of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architecture resulting from ubiquitous content storage and content-based node-by-node forwarding nature of ICN. Much is yet to see how they jointly act towards improving user's quality of experience. To this end, we formulate in this paper a unified problem of caching and multipath forwarding as a network optimization problem to maximize user satisfaction which is expressed by their utility function. The formulation allows us to see caching and multipath forwarding in ICN from a congestion control perspective and to reinforce the advantage of a class of congestion-aware caching where in-network caches are used to absorb network congestion and to enhance user's satisfaction. In that context, multipath forwarding plays the role of directing content delivery to less congested paths where network capacity is abundant or where requested content has been stored by in-network caches. We evaluate such a congestion control-based, coupled caching and multipath forwarding approach in simulations. The result confirms the advantage of our approach compared with existing ones.