Modeling and Performance Analysis of Information-Centric Networks

Abstract

Information-Centric Networks (ICNs) are currently being proposed as a new paradigm for future networks, where the focus will be more on information dissemination rather than host-centric pairwise communication. In this paper, we develop a modeling framework that is general enough to model the broad set of ICN architectures that are currently being considered. Using our model, we investigate several application level performance metrics such as the steady-state distribution of the number of replicas of a given content in the network (termed as the service capacity), and the expected hop-count from the content requester and the location from where the content is served (termed as the response delay.) Finally, we present some numerical results that demonstrate how our model can be used to gain understanding of traffic and content engineering aspects in the design of ICNs.