Light in‐network caching enabled IP network: A large‐scale content delivery in MAN

Abstract

Although the future Internet paradigm especially Information‐Centric Networking (ICN) has been recognized and accepted in recent years, the end‐to‐end IP network structure always shows the overwhelming development tendency due to the deployment difficulty of ICN on the real and large‐scale network environment. However, each coin has two sides, that is to say, ICN also has its own unique value, that is, in‐network caching feature which is not included in the current IP network. In this letter, we propose an In‐network caching enabled IP network paradigm, which is a novel concept different from both ICN and the traditional IP network. Based on such paradigm, we present a light content delivery scheme depending on identity, with the chain‐based fine‐grained caching support. Given the NP‐hardness of delivery scheme in mesh topology, we make a case study in Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) to address the large‐scale content delivery scenario. The experimental results show that the proposal in this letter can effectively relieve the load pressure of origin server, and can also greatly improve the delivery efficiency.