On Caching and Routing in Information-Centric Networks

Abstract

With the exponential growth of content in recent years, users are primarily interested in obtaining particular content and are not concerned with the host housing the content. By treating content as a first class citizen, information- centric networks (ICN) seek to transform the Internet from a host-to-host communication model to a content-centric model. A key component of ICN is to cache content at storage-enabled routers. By caching content at in-network routers, network performance can be improved by delivering content from routers closer to the user and not from the origin servers (content custodians). In this article, we provide an overview of the state-of-the-art cache management and routing policies in ICN. We present a small comparison study of some state-of-the-art algorithms on a real Internet topology to help the reader appreciate how the different strategies compare against one another. Our simulation results demonstrate that it is hard to pick a winner among existing policies. We conclude the article with a discussion of open research questions.