Information-centric Networking Caching Research Articles

Enhancing Edge-Linked Caching in Information-Centric Networking for Internet of Things With Deep Reinforcement Learning

Enhancing Edge-Linked Caching in Information-Centric Networking for Internet of Things With Deep Reinforcement Learning

Blockchain-Enabled On-Path Caching for Efficient and Reliable Content Delivery in Information-Centric Networks

As the demand for online content continues to grow, traditional Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) are facing significant challenges in terms of scalability and performance. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promising new approach to content delivery that aims to address these issues by placing content at the center of the network architecture. One of the key features of ICNs is on-path caching, which allows content to be cached at intermediate routers along the path from the source to the destination. On-path caching in ICNs still faces some challenges, such as the scalability of the cache and the management of cache consistency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes several alternative caching schemes that can be integrated into ICNs using blockchain technology. These schemes include Bloom filters, content-based routing, and hybrid caching, which combine the advantages of off-path and on-path cachings. The proposed blockchain-enabled on-path caching mechanism ensures the integrity and authenticity of cached content, and smart contracts automate the caching process and incentivize caching nodes. To evaluate the performance of these caching alternatives, the authors conduct experiments using real-world datasets. The results show that on-path caching can significantly reduce network congestion and improve content delivery efficiency. The Bloom filter caching scheme achieved a cache hit rate of over 90% while reducing the cache size by up to 80% compared to traditional caching. The content-based routing scheme also achieved high cache hit rates while maintaining low latency.

A systematic survey on content caching in ICN and ICN-IoT: Challenges, approaches and strategies

Context:Data traffic increased in recent years due to the expansion of IoT (Internet of Things) applications, and most IoT applications follow a content-oriented paradigm. The host-to-host nature of the existing internet architecture makes it inefficient for handling content distribution and information sharing. ICN (Information Centric Network) is a content-centric network that offers guaranteed solutions for data transfer between consumers and producers. ICN caching enables the caching technique in available resources, which can enhance the overall network performance by enabling users to access data within the network. Objective:This study aims to review the literature on caching approaches and strategies in ICN-IoT to identify areas that need more attention in current and future research directions. Method:A systematic mapping study was conducted to identify the relevant literature, and 88 publications that are categorized as caching approaches and caching strategies were chosen as the most relevant studies. Result:Based on caching approaches and caching strategies, the articles are grouped. Edge caching (50%), in-network caching (25%), and hybrid caching (25%) represent the majority of the articles on caching approaches. Popularity-based caching (26%), cooperative caching (17%), collaborative caching (17%), machine learning-based caching (19%), and probabilistic caching (7%) represent the majority of the articles in caching strategies. This study further presents the simulators, performance metrics, parameters and performance evaluation of the existing literature. Conclusion:The results confirm that ICN is a futuristic internet architecture that assigns a content name to each content in the network and enables in-network caching; it is a superior technique for resolving IoT challenges and increases the overall network efficiency.

In-network caching in information-centric networks for different applications: A survey

In-network caching in information-centric networks for different applications: A survey

An Information Centric Network for Distributed Registery withContent Unique Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credentials

Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs), a new self-manageable method of authentication that is currently being standardised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), are new standards for Content Unique Identifiers. Verifiable credentials (VCs), another ongoing standardisation (by the same W3C working group) that permits private and secure proofs of attribute ownership, are closely related to DIDs. Both of these methods rely on a central immutable decentralised registry (such as a blockchain or peer-to-peer network) where crucial meta-data is stored. Using the newly developing paradigm of Information Centric Networking (ICN), we design, construct, and evaluate a secure DID/VC registry service. The ''search by name'' feature of ICN, together with a secure protocol, are combined with the decentralised nature and our goal is to achieve technique for keeping in sync copies of an object at several locations. Our design has little network cost and provides quick lookup speeds because to ICN's built-in multicast and caching functionality

Content Caching Based on Popularity and Priority of Content Using seq2seq LSTM in ICN

Efficient content caching is essential to address the explosive growth of multimedia contents and most works on content cache placement have been proposed mainly based on the popularity of content. Since the priority of content is also an important attribute of content, we consider both popularity and priority of content together for content caching in information-centric networking (ICN). We define weighted delivery cost of content as content delivery cost multiplied by a weighted sum of popularity and priority of the content. Then, we formulate optimized content cache placement problem to minimize weighted content delivery cost for all content requests in a hierarchical network architecture with multi-access edge computing (MEC) and software-defined networking (SDN) controller. Average quality of experience (QoE), i.e., average content delivery cost, for contents with each priority is imposed as constraint. The number of content requests is predicted based on seq2seq long short-term memory (LSTM) model in MECs and this is delivered to SDN controller. Then, SDN controller obtains predicted popularity of contents and decides content placement in MECs and core routers by solving the content cache placement optimization problem based on binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO). Performance of the proposed content caching scheme is compared with conventional popularity-based, popularity prediction-based, and popularity prediction-based optimization schemes, from the aspect of QoE satisfaction ratio, average cost, weighted average cost, total cost, and weighted total cost. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme at caching content with high priority efficiently, at the expense of caching content with low priority.

An Energy Efficient Local Popularity Based Cooperative Caching for Mobile Information Centric Networks

The usage of social media applications such as Youtube, Facebook, and other applications is rapidly increasing with each passing day. These applications are used for uploading informational content such as images, videos, and voices, which results in exponential traffic overhead. Due to these overheads (high bandwidth consumption), the service providers fail to provide high-speed and low latency internet to users around the globe. The current internet cannot cope with such high data traffic due to its fixed infrastructure (host centric-network) degrading the network performance. A new internet paradigm known as Information Centric Networks (ICN) was introduced based on content-oriented addressing. The concept of ICN is to entertain the request locally by neighbor nodes without accessing the source, which will help offload the network’s data traffic. ICN can mitigate traffic overhead and meet future Internet requirements. In this work, we propose a novel decentralized placement scheme named self-organized cooperative caching (SOCC) for mobile ICN to improve the overall network performance through efficient bandwidth utilization and less traffic overhead. The proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes in terms of energy consumption by 55%, average latency, and cache hit rate by a minimum of 35%.

An Active Path-Associated Cache Scheme for Mobile Scenes

With the widespread growth of mass content, information-centric networks (ICN) have become one of the research hotspots of future network architecture. One of the important features of ICN is ubiquitous in-network caching. In recent years, the explosive growth of mobile devices has brought content dynamics, which poses a new challenge to the original ICN caching mechanism. This paper focuses on the WiFi mobile scenario of ICN. We design a new path-associated active caching scheme to shorten the time delay of users obtaining content to enhance the user experience. In this article, based on the WiFi scenario, we first propose a solution for neighbor access point selection from a theoretical perspective, considering the caching cost and transition probability. The cache content is then forwarded based on the selected neighbor set. For cached content, we propose content freshness according to mobile characteristics and consider content popularity at the same time. For cache nodes, we focus on the size of the remaining cache space and the number of hops from the cache to the user. We have implemented this strategy based on the value of caching on the forwarding path. The simulation results show that our caching strategy has a significant improvement in performance compared with active caching and other caching strategies.

PB-NCC: A Popularity-Based Caching Strategy with Number-of-Copies Control in Information-Centric Networks

The Information-Centric Network (ICN), designed for efficient content acquisition and distribution, is a promising candidate architecture for the future Internet. In-network caching in ICN makes it possible to reuse contents and the Name Resolution System (NRS) makes cached contents better serve users. In this paper, we focused on the ICN caching scenario equipped with an NRS, which records the positions of contents cached in ICN. We propose a Popularity-based caching strategy with Number-of-Copies Control (PB-NCC) in this paper. PB-NCC is proposed to solve the problems of unreasonable content distribution and frequent cache replacement in traditional caching strategies in ICN. We examine PB-NCC with a large number of experiments in different topologies and workloads. The simulation results reveal that PB-NCC can improve the cache hit ratio by at least 8.85% and reduce the server load by at least 11.34% compared with other on-path caching strategies, meanwhile maintaining a low network latency.

Performance Comparison of Cache Based Routing in Information Centric IoT Networks

In-network caching within the distributed computing is one of the most promising aspects of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) in comparison with traditional centralized server based data retrieval. With ICN, it can ensure that required data is readily available within the intermediate IoT routers, even when the original producer is not reachable. However, in Internet of Things (IoT), where the storage capacity is often severely limited, IoT nodes cannot simply cache any and all the content that will receive to the intermediate caching device(routers). Hence, it is very significant to know which content has to cache and how long the content has to be in the intermediate caching device. Moreover, cache-based routing plays a predominant role in reducing the end-to-end delay with enhanced network throughput by efficiently discovering the shortest-path from the intermediate caching devices in ICN-IoT networks. In this paper, comparison of different cache based routing protocols for ICN-IoT networks is discussed in terms of ICN caching and cache replacement strategies along with the performance metrics suitable for evaluating in an IoT context.

Quality of Experience in ICN: Keep Your Low- Bitrate Close and High-Bitrate Closer

Recent studies into streaming media delivery suggest that performance gains from ubiquitous caching in Information-Centric Networks (ICN) may be negated by Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (DAS), the de facto method for retrieving multimedia content. Bitrate adaptation mechanisms, that drive video streaming, clash with caching mechanisms in ways that affect users' Quality of Experience (QoE). Cache performance also diminishes as consumers dynamically select content encoded at different bitrates. In this article we use this evidence to draw a novel insight: in adaptive streaming over ICN, bitrates should be prioritized alongside popularity and hit rates. We build on this insight to propose RippleCache as a family of cache placement schemes that safeguard high-bitrate content at the edge and push low-bitrate content into the network core. Doing so reduces contention of cache resources, as well as congestion in the network. To validate RippleCache claims we construct two separate implementations. We design RippleClassic as a benchmark solution that optimizes content placement by maximizing a measure for ICNs shown to have high correlation with QoE. In addition, our lighter-weight RippleFinder is then re-designed with distributed execution for application in large-scale systems. RippleCache performance gains are reinforced by evaluations in NS-3 against state-of-the-art baseline approaches, using standard measures of QoE as defined by the DASH Industry Forum. Our results demonstrate that RippleClassic and RippleFinder deliver content that suffers less oscillation and rebuffering, all while achieving the highest levels of video quality; thus indicating overall improvements to QoE.

A Distributed Cache Placement Scheme for Large-Scale Information-Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promising candidate architecture for the future internet that leverages the content name instead of the source of the content (host address). ICN decouples the content from its original location and owner, and enables in-network caching at the network layer. Similarly, the inception of ioT has enabled futuristic applications and services in almost every walk of life. Due to the nature of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, traditional TCP/IP-based internet architecture faces challenges such as addressing, heterogeneity, availability, scalability, and resource constraints. Therefore, ICN can be a suitable choice to address these challenges in IoT applications. Among other features of ICN, the in-network caching feature increases the availability and efficiency of content-sharing in IoT networks. Therefore, it is essential to have efficient cache placement strategies in ICN to increase its utility. in this regard, in this article, we propose an ICN cache placement strategy at the edge network for IoT applications. More precisely, we design a distributed cache placement scheme that aims to push the popular content to the edge network and keep the relatively less-popular content at the core. We also propose a collaborative mechanism to fetch content from the nearest neighbor's content-store as well as propose a cache replacement policy based on the content popularity. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the proposed scheme and the obtained results show the efficiency and out-performance against similar strategies in the literature.

The Effect of Caching on CP and ISP Policies in Information-Centric Networks

Internet traffic volume is increasing, and this causes scalability issues in content delivery. Information-centric network has been introduced to support this increase in Internet traffic through caching. While collaborative caching in information-centric network is a crucial feature to improve network performance and reduce delivery costs in content distribution, the current pricing strategies on the Internet are not incentive compatible with information-centric network interconnection. In this paper, we focus on the economic incentive interactions in caching deployment between several types of information-centric network providers (content provider and Internet service provider). In particular, we develop game-theoretic models to study the interaction between providers in an information-centric network model where the providers are motivated to cache and share content. We use a generalized Zipf distribution to model content popularity. We formulate the interactions between the Internet service providers and between the content providers as a noncooperative game. We use a Stackelberg game model to capture the interactions between the content provider and Internet service providers. Through mathematical analysis, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium under some conditions. An iterative and distributed algorithm based on best response dynamics is proposed to achieve the equilibrium point. The numerical simulations illustrate that our proposed game models result in a win-win solution.

An On-Path Caching Scheme Based on the Expected Number of Copies in Information-Centric Networks

The Information-Centric Network (ICN) is one of the most influential future network architectures and in-network caching in ICN brings some helpful features, such as low latency and mobility support. How to allocate cache capacity and place content properly will greatly influence the performance of ICN. This paper focuses on the cache allocation problem and content placement problem under the given cache space budget. Firstly, a lightweight allocation method utilizing information of both topology and content popularity is proposed, to allocate cache space and get the expected number of copies of popular content. The expected number of copies represents the number of content copies placed in the topology. Then, an on-path caching scheme based on the expected number of copies is proposed to handle the content placement problem. In the cache allocation scenario, the lightweight allocation method performs better than other baseline methods. In the content placement scenario, Leave Copy Down (LCD) based on the expected number of copies performs the second-best and is very close to Optimal Content Placement (OCP).

Improving Network Throughput by Hardware Realization of a Dynamic Content Caching Scheme for Information-Centric Networking (ICN)

Caching popular content at storage enabled routers or small-cell base stations (SBSs) is a key technology for future communication systems. Primarily limited to wired backbone systems, content-caching techniques are useful to offload mobile data traffic too. Several protocols have been developed towards realization of content-caching, namely, information-centric networking (ICN), content-centric networking, and named data networking. Studies have revealed that incorporating ICN caching schemes at SBSs could significantly enhance the user level performance, i.e., the lesser download delay and the higher throughput. However, smaller coverage area of a SBS would make the communication prone to high handover probability. Therefore, the implementation of ICN caching schemes at SBS requires extremely low processing delay, i.e., delay to search if the requested content is available at the cache, and accordingly make decision to serve the content request or forward it to the content server. In this article, a configurable hardware add-on has been developed to incorporate content caching features in a traditional SBS that can serve the user with extremely low processing delay while optimizing a combination of various network and hardware metrics. Using extensive results being generated from simulations, the usefulness of content caching has been demonstrated, and the effect of several hardware parameters over the latency performance has been studied too. In addition, the caching hardware accelerator has the ability to adapt dynamically to the optimal caching policy required by the prevailing network conditions as well as hardware requirements. An improvement upto 53% in network delay and 15% in handover probability due to the support of hardware-based caching is observed that incurs a negligible $$0.07\,{\hbox {mm}}^2$$ and up to only 11.1 mW energy overhead while operating in the range of 690–910 MHz.

An Incrementally Deployable IP-Compatible-Information-Centric Networking Hierarchical Cache System

The major advantage of information-centric networking (ICN) lies in in-network caching. Ubiquitous cache nodes reduce the user’s download latency of content and the drain of network bandwidth, which enables efficient content distribution. Due to the huge cost of updating an entire network infrastructure, it is realistic for ICN to be integrated into an IP network, which poses new challenges to design a cache system and corresponding content router. In this paper, we firstly observed that the behavior pattern of data requests based on a name resolution system (NRS) makes an ICN cache system implicitly form a hierarchical and nested structure. We propose a complete design and an analytical model to characterize an uncooperative hierarchical ICN caching system compatible with IP. Secondly, to facilitate the incremental deployment of an ICN cache system in an IP network, we designed and implemented a cache-supported router with multi-terabyte cache capabilities. Finally, the simulation and measurement results show the accuracy of proposed analytical model, the significant gains on hit ratio, and the access latency of the hierarchical ICN cache system compared with a flat cache system based on naming routing, as well as the high performance of the implemented ICN router.

An Overview of Content Poisoning in NDN: Attacks, Countermeasures, and Direction

With a huge demand for replicated content on the Internet, a new networking paradigm called information-centric networking (ICN) has been introduced for efficient content dissemination. In ICN, named content is distributed over the network cache and it is accessed by name instead of a location identifier. These aspects allow users to retrieve content from any of the nodes having replicas, and consequently 1) network resources are more efficiently utilized by avoiding redundant transmission and 2) more scalable services are provided by distributing server loads. However, in-network caching in ICN brings about a new type of security issues, called content poisoning attacks, where fabricated content is located in the network cache and interferes with the normal behavior of the system. In this paper, we look into the problems of content poisoning in ICN and discuss security architectures against them. In particular, we reconsider the state-of-the-art schemes from the perspective of feasibility, and propose a practical security architecture.

T-Caching: Enhancing Feasibility of In-Network Caching in ICN

In Information-Centric Networking (ICN), in-network caching is one of the core functions to implement efficient content distribution. As content is served from the network cache, redundant transmission across the same link is reduced and better quality services are provided to the user. However, caching operations (locating cached content, validating/writing content to the cache) may be a large burden on routers. In this article, we substantially reduce the caching overhead of routers by introducing T-Caching, a new in-network caching model in which routers selectively cache some of the most popular content recommended by content providers. In T-Caching, tokens are used 1) to enable routers to maximize caching benefits by simply controlling the amount of content inserted into the cache; 2) to allow content providers to recommend the most popular content as much as routers would actually cache. Our simulation and empirical studies using synthetic data, as well as real-world traces, show that T-Caching allows routers to insert much less than 1 percent of the content into the cache, compared to typical caching mechanisms. Nevertheless, the cache-hit ratio is improved by up to 2~9 times depending on the cache size. We believe that T-Caching can significantly contribute to improving feasibility and performance of in-network caching in ICN.

Game theory based cooperative caching strategy in information‐centric networking

Information‐centric networking (ICN) has received much attention from the governments and researcher in recent years thanks to its in‐network caching feature. In this paper, a cooperative ICN caching scheme based on game theory is proposed, where the ICN topology has been partitioned into some domains. For each piece of content in the individual domain, the caching value degree for the local domain as well as the neighboring domains is computed and it is regarded as the key factor of caching decision. In particular, the caching decision aims at minimizing the average delay of obtaining contents. The experimental results show that the novel cooperative caching scheme has higher cache hit rate and lower delay compared with two benchmarks.

An SDN-Based Caching Decision Policy for Video Caching in Information-Centric Networking

The considerable increase of multimedia services, such as video-on-demand (VoD) services, is a significant contributor to the total Internet traffic. Software-defined networking (SDN) and information-centric networking (ICN) are two promising technologies that can be combined to facilitate video delivery and to reduce network delays. In this paper, we first formulate the caching decision problem as a 0-1 integer linear programming (ILP) problem. Second, in contrast to existing approaches that solve the formulated ILP problem by assuming all future video requests are known, we consider the impact of the time scale, which transforms the static 0-1 ILP problem into a dynamic problem. By solving the dynamic 0-1 ILP problem, we find more accurate optimal solutions compared to existing approaches. Third, since the formulated 0-1 dynamic ILP problem is NP-hard, we leverage the in-network caching of ICN and the global view of the SDN controller to propose a novel SDN-based caching decision policy. Finally, extensive evaluations are performed, and the results demonstrate that the proposed SDN-based caching decision policy provides solutions that are close to the optimum in substantially less computation time. The SDN-based caching decision policy also outperforms existing practical ICN caching decision policies in terms of the cache hit ratio and the average number of hops, which are directly related to the video delivery latency. Moreover, the SDN-based caching decision policy can substantially reduce the number of generated and broadcasted interest packets, which is a shortcoming of the current ICN.