Evaluating the benefits of caching and stateless forwarding in mobile information-centric networks

Abstract

Caching content at storage-enabled network nodes is one of the salient features of Information-centric Networking (ICN). Most existing ICN caching and routing strategies have been designed for and evaluated in static networks [2], while mobile networks have received limited attention [1]. In this paper, we consider a mobile ICN and examine the benefits that in-network caching can provide in a mobile setting. From our experiments on mobile grid networks, we observe that approximately 43% of requests cannot be routed and hence are dropped in a mobile network due to absence of direct paths from users to the content custodian (origin server). For the requests served, we observe that while state-of-the-art caching strategies outperform the baseline Leave Copy Everywhere (LCE) strategy in static networks, all caching strategies including LCE tend to provide similar performance as network mobility increases. For requests that cannot be routed due to unavailability of paths from users to the custodian, we next explore the benefits of augmenting shortest path routing with a simple stateless random walk request forwarding strategy that enables a user to search neighboring caches. We observe that just using a simple random walk strategy when a direct path is unavailable increases the total percentage of requests served by 6% on average.