Optimal Pending Interest Table Size for ICN With Mobile Producers

Abstract

Many next generation Internet architectures exist in the literature for addressing various issues like increasing traffic, mobility and efficient content dissemination. One such emerging fundamental design is Information Centric Networking (ICN). The Pending Interest Table (PIT) is one of the essential components of the ICN forwarding plane responsible for the stateful routing in ICN. Optimal size of the PIT is essential for the efficient performance of the network and the enhanced consumer experience. Therefore, the optimal sizing of the PIT under various network conditions is an important and challenging problem. To this end, this paper models the PIT of a router as a GI/M/c/N queue. The model has (i) a general arrival process to accommodate the diverse nature of traffic, (ii) a service time model which takes into account the caching at the content stores and the mobility of producers, and (iii) a sojourn time distribution which is used to characterize the content delivery time at the consumers. Using the GI/M/c/N queueing model, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the PIT size while subjecting the interest drop probability to an upper bound. The accuracy of our analytical model is demonstrated using simulations on different Internet Service Provider (ISP) topologies across a wide range of system parameters.