Multi-Attribute Caching: Towards efficient cache management in Content-Centric Networks

Abstract

Content Centric Networking (CCN) has gained much attention of the research community in past few years. The default caching strategy of CCN is to store at each content-router along the downloading path. While this helps in increasing content availability and quality-of-experience (QoE) by reducing delay and reducing server load, the approach is not resource-efficient as it introduces high cache redundancy. Hence, there is a need to devise efficient caching mechanisms that allows maximum availability of content while consuming minimum possible resources. In this paper, we propose Multi-Attribute Caching Strategy (MAC) for CCN Networks that is based on using multiple parameters instead of a single attribute. These parameters include hop count or distance, node degree, content popularity and available storage space at the nodes. The scheme promises to overcome inefficient cache utilization by intelligently selecting caching locations along the content delivery paths. Simulation results indicate that MAC reduces the cache load at each node while increasing network cache hit rate.