Locating the content in the locality: ICN caching and routing strategy revisited

Abstract

In Information Centric Networking (ICN), besides Off-path caching, On-path caching is an integrated caching solution with-in an ISP's local network. However, in On-path caching, content is cached en-route in the backward path towards the Interest generator and local RENE1/NRS2 (in routing through name resolution) or FIB3 (in name-based routing) is not aware of the cached data. Hence, the most widely used intra-domain routing protocol and their forwarding strategy cannot address all available temporary cached copies of content. Thus, on-path caching strategy usually suffers from either of the two drawbacks- 1) too many replications within AS (Autonomous system) which do not add substantial value in terms of cache resource utilization. 2) An attempt to minimize redundancy ends up with the cost of fetching more copy of the same content from the repository (i.e., the closest cache copy is unknown/ not en-route). We propose an integrated routing and caching solution which reduces the caching redundancy and maximize the probability of finding nearby cached content, resulting in efficient utilization of available cache resources of ISP's as a whole. We introduce novel concepts of naming the content router and caching the content's cache-route to address the issue. We leverage NDN node architecture and the forwarding plane/strategy (of routing) as well to achieve our goal.