Information-centric Networking Caching Research Articles

Enhancements To Content Caching Using Weighted Greedy Caching Algorithm In Information Centric Networking

Abstract Information-Centric Networks (ICN) or Future Internet is the revolutionary concept for the existing infrastructure of the internet that changes the paradigm from host-centric networks to data-centric networks. Caching in Information-Centric Networks (ICN) has become one of the most critical research areas in today’s world, especially for the leading in content delivery over Internet companies like Netflix, Facebook, Google, etc. This paper is intended to propose a novel Caching strategy called Weighted Greedy Dual Size Frequency for caching in Information-Centric networks. In this paper, the WGDSF considers multiple critical factors for maintaining the Web Content efficiently in ICN Caching Router. Simulation is done for the various performance metrics like Cache Hit ratio, Link load, Path Stretch, and Latency for WGDSF cache replacement algorithm, and results shown that WGDSF outperforms well compared with LRU, LFU, and RAND Caching Strategies.

Secure Distribution of Protected Content in Information-Centric Networking

The benefits of the ubiquitous caching in ICN are profound, such features make ICN promising for content distribution, but it also introduces a challenge to content protection against the unauthorized access. The protection of a content against unauthorized access requires consumer authentication and involves the conventional end-to-end encryption. However, in information-centric networking (ICN), such end-to-end encryption makes the content caching ineffective since encrypted contents stored in a cache are useless for any consumers except those who know the encryption key. For effective caching of encrypted contents in ICN, we propose a secure distribution of protected content (SDPC) scheme, which ensures that only authenticated consumers can access the content. SDPC is lightweight and allows consumers to verify the originality of the published content by using a symmetric key encryption. Moreover, SDPC naming scheme provides protection against privacy leakage. The security of SDPC was proved with the BAN logic and Scyther tool verification, and simulation results show that SDPC can reduce the content download delay.

PUC: Packet Update Caching for energy efficient IoT-based Information-Centric Networking

The future Internet, known as Information-Centric Networking (ICN), is a realistic solution to content delivery between the content request generators (subscribers) and the server (publisher) in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment due to caching contents by in-network nodes. However, significant redundant copies of contents can be cached in this kind of network which, besides numerous advantages, introduces some undesirable features, such as security issues, content redundancy, access control, and cache overflow among others. ICN has different modules, such as mobility, routing, and caching, which are utmost important for the IoT network due to the nature of energy-constrained IoT devices. While numerous attempts are presently being made to institutionalize this emerging paradigm, careful considerations are needed to caching module at the early stage of this architecture. This is important instead of holding up until the innovation gets used and experienced. In this article, we first list some of the important features and limitations of the ICN-based IoT caching and then propose an ICN caching strategy that fits well in the energy efficient and secure IoT environment. The proposed strategy is simulated and compared with the ProbCache mechanism with regards to energy consumption and bandwidth utilization. Preliminary experimental analyses demonstrate that the proposed strategy produces better results than the ProbCache as long as the cache size of network nodes is increased.

A functional taxonomy of caching schemes: Towards guided designs in information-centric networks

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a developing paradigm, poised to transform the Internet's architecture. At its core, ICN focuses on efficient content dissemination and retrieval, regardless of storage location and physical representation of content. Thus, content caching schemes play a pivotal role in providing fast, reliable, and scalable content distribution and delivery. Given the multitude of caching schemes that have evolved over the past few years, recent developments have been often hampered by a fixed set of design primitives. In this paper, we present a functional-based taxonomy of ICN caching schemes, detailing each functional component, and depicting the functional mandates of these schemes to aid in contrasting their operations. The goal of this survey is to guide the design and development of ICN protocols, building on insights from caching schemes and their inherent tradeoffs. We present a comprehensive benchmark for future caching schemes, coupled with a quantitative as well as qualitative analysis of leading caching schemes, encompassing cross-scheme performance metrics. We highlight the impact of ICN caching schemes in the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs). This work concludes by presenting insights for future developments in ICN, with a dedicated discussion on guided development for researchers in this domain; building on the aforementioned taxonomy, as well as quantitative and qualitative analyses.

PPCS: A Progressive Popularity-Aware Caching Scheme for Edge-Based Cache Redundancy Avoidance in Information-Centric Networks

This article proposes a novel chunk-based caching scheme known as the Progressive Popularity-Aware Caching Scheme (PPCS) to improve content availability and eliminate the cache redundancy issue of Information-Centric Networking (ICN). Particularly, the proposal considers both entire-object caching and partial-progressive caching for popular and non-popular content objects, respectively. In the case that the content is not popular enough, PPCS first caches initial chunks of the content at the edge node and then progressively continues caching subsequent chunks at upstream Content Nodes (CNs) along the delivery path over time, according to the content popularity and each CN position. Therefore, PPCS efficiently avoids wasting cache space for storing on-path content duplicates and improves cache diversity by allowing no more than one replica of a specified content to be cached. To enable a complete ICN caching solution for communication networks, we also propose an autonomous replacement policy to optimize the cache utilization by maximizing the utility of each CN from caching content items. By simulation, we show that PPCS, utilizing edge-computing for the joint optimization of caching decision and replacement policies, considerably outperforms relevant existing ICN caching strategies in terms of latency (number of hops), cache redundancy, and content availability (hit rate), especially when the CN’s cache size is small.

A Periodic Caching Strategy Solution for the Smart City in Information-Centric Internet of Things

Named Data Networking is an evolving network model of the Information-centric networking (ICN) paradigm which provides Named-based data contents. In-network caching is the responsible for dissemination of these contents in a scalable and cost-efficient way. Due to the rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) traffic, ICN is envisioned to be an appropriate architecture to maintain the IoT networks. In fact, ICN offers unique naming, multicast communications and, most beneficially, in-network caching that minimizes the response latency and server load. IoT environment involves a study of ICN caching policies in terms of content placement strategies. This paper addressed the caching strategies with the aim to recognize which caching strategy is the most suitable for IoT networks. Simulation results show the impact of different IoT ICN-based caching strategies, out of these; periodic caching is the most appropriate strategy for IoT environments in terms of stretch that results in decreasing the retrieval latency and improves the cache-hit ratio.

Greedy Caching: An optimized content placement strategy for information-centric networks

Most content placement strategies in information-centric networks (ICN) primarily focus on pushing popular content to the network edge, fail to effectively utilize the caches in the network core and provide limited performance improvement. In this paper, we propose Greedy Caching, a content placement strategy that determines the set of content to be cached at each network node so as to maximize the network hit rate. Greedy Caching caches the most popular content at the network edge, recalculates the relative popularity of each piece of content based on the request miss stream from downstream caches and then determines the content to be cached in the network core. We perform exhaustive simulation in the Icarus simulator [1] using realistic Internet topologies (e.g., GARR, GEANT, WIDE, scale-free networks) as well as real-world request stream traces, and demonstrate that Greedy Caching provides significant improvement in content download delay (referred to as latency) over state-of-the-art dynamic caching and routing strategies for ICN for a wide range of simulation parameters. Our simulation results suggest an improvement of 5–28% in latency and 15–50% improvement in hit rate over state-of-the-art policies for synthetic traces.

DADI: Defending against distributed denial of service in information‐centric networking routing and caching

Information‐centric networking (ICN) is a new communication paradigm for the upcoming next‐generation internet (NGI). ICN is an open environment that depends on in‐network caching and focuses on contents. These attributes make ICN architectures subject to different types of routing and caching attacks. An attacker publishes invalid contents or announces malicious routes and sends malicious requests for available and unavailable contents. These types of attacks can cause distributed denial of service (DDoS) and cache pollution in ICN architectures. In this paper,we propose a Defending solution Against DDoS in ICN routing and caching (DADI) that detects and prevents these DDoS attacks. This solution allows ICN routers to differentiate between legitimate and attack behaviors in the detection phase based on threshold values. In the prevention phase, ICN routers are able to take actions against these attacks. In our experiments, we measure satisfied requests for legitimate users and cache hit ratio for ICN routers, which are evaluated over different scenarios when there are 20%, 50%, and 80% attackers with respect to legitimate users. The experiments show that the proposed solution effectively mitigates routing‐ and caching‐related DDoS attacks in ICN and enhances ICN performance in the existence of DDoS attacks.

Design and Evaluation of Probabilistic Caching in Information-Centric Networking

In-network caching is a key feature of information-centric networking (ICN). However, challenges still exist in ICN caching such as how to place content replicas among cache nodes to maximize cache system benefits without introducing too much overhead. In this paper, we formulate the content placement problem and propose a distributed probabilistic caching strategy to enhance cache efficiency. Each node makes cache decision individually and caches passing content with certain probability, which is proportional to content popularity and content placement benefit. As a component of our scheme, we also propose an accurate method to predict the variations of content popularity. Besides, a global-popularity-based caching scheme is proposed to be used as a benchmark for performance evaluation. We conduct extensive simulations based on ndnSIM and evaluate our scheme on tree, intra-AS, and inter-AS topologies. Results indicate it outperforms the state-of-art schemes in terms of cache hit ratio, access latency, cache operation cost, and link bandwidth savings. It can achieve dramatic performance improvement, even in the case of a small cache size. In particular, the reduction of caching operation can reach up to two orders of magnitude. We also examine the impacts of various replacement policies on cache performance and perform overhead analysis. Finally, we give a simplified implementation of our scheme and validate it via simulations.

Caching in Information-Centric Networking: Strategies, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an appealing architecture that has received a remarkable interest from the research community thanks to its friendly structure. Several projects have proposed innovative ICN models to cope with the Internet practice, which moves from host-centrism to receiver-driven communication. A worth mentioning component of these novel models is in-network caching, which provides flexibility and pervasiveness for the upturn of swiftness in data distribution. Because of the rapid Internet traffic growth, cache deployment and content caching have been unanimously accepted as conspicuous ICN issues to be resolved. In this article, a survey of cache management strategies in ICN is presented along with their contributions and limitations, and their performance is evaluated in a simulation network environment with respect to cache hit, stretch ratio, and eviction operations. Some unresolved ICN caching challenges and directions for future research in this networking area are also discussed.

Request Expectation Index Based Cache Replacement Algorithm for Streaming Content Delivery over ICN

Since the content delivery unit over Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has shifted from files to the segments of a file named chunks, solely either file-level or chunk-level request probability is insufficient for ICN cache management. In this paper, a Request Expectation Index (RXI) based cache replacement algorithm for streaming content delivery is proposed. In this algorithm, RXI is introduced to serve as a fine-grained and unified estimation criteria of possible future request probability for cached chunks. RXI is customized for streaming content delivery by adopting both file-level and chunk-level request probability and considering the dynamically varied request status at each route as well. Compared to prior work, the proposed algorithm evicts the chunk with the minimum expectation of future request to maintain a high cache utilization. Additionally, simulation results demonstrate that the RXI-based algorithm can remarkably enhance the streaming content delivery performance and can be deployed in complex network scenarios. The proposed results validate that, by taking fine-grained request probability and request status into consideration, the customized in-network caching algorithm can improve the ICN streaming content delivery performance by high cache utilization, fast content delivery, and lower network traffic.

Milking the Cache Cow With Fairness in Mind

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a popular research topic. At its heart is the concept of in-network caching. Various algorithms have been proposed for optimizing ICN caching, many of which rely on collaborative principles, i.e. multiple caches interacting to decide what to store. Past work has assumed altruistic nodes that will sacrifice their own performance for the global optimum. We argue that this assumption is insufficient and oversimplifies the reality. We address this problem by modeling the in-network caching problem as a Nash bargaining game. We develop optimal and heuristic caching solutions that consider both performance and fairness. We argue that only algorithms that are fair to all parties involved in caching will encourage engagement and cooperation. Through extensive simulations, we show our heuristic solution, FairCache, ensures that all collaborative caches achieve performance gains without undermining the performance of others.

Rate-Selective Caching for Adaptive Streaming Over Information-Centric Networks

The growing demand for video content is reshaping our view of the current Internet, and mandating a fundamental change for future Internet paradigms. A current focus on Information-Centric Networks (ICN) promises a novel approach to intrinsically handling large content dissemination, caching and retrieval. While ubiquitous in-network caching in ICNs can expedite video delivery, a pressing challenge lies in provisioning scalable video streaming over adaptive requests for different bit rates. In this paper, we propose novel video caching schemes in ICN, to address variable bit rates and content sizes for best cache utilization. Our objective is to maximize overall throughput to improve the Quality of Service (QoS). In order to achieve this goal, we model the dynamic characteristics of rate adaptation, deriving caps on average delay, and propose DaCPlace which optimizes cache placement decisions. Building on DaCPlace , we further present a heuristic scheme, StreamCache , for low-overhead adaptive video caching. We conduct comprehensive simulations on NS-3 (specifically under the ndnSIM module). Results demonstrate how DaCPlace enables users to achieve the least delay per bit and StreamCache outperforms existing schemes, achieving near-optimal performance to DaCPlace .

Fair throughput allocation in Information-Centric Networks

Cache networks are the cornerstones of today’s Internet, helping it to scale by an extensive use of Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Benefiting from CDN’s successful insights, ubiquitous caching through Information-Centric Networks (ICN) is increasingly regarded as a premier future Internet architecture contestant. However, the use of in-network caches seems to cause an issue in the fairness of resource sharing among contents. Indeed, in legacy communication networks, link buffers were the principal resources to be shared. Under max-min flow-wise fair bandwidth sharing [14], content throughput was not tied to content popularity. Including caches in this ecosystem raises new issues since common cache management policies such as probabilistic Least Recently Used (p-LRU) or even more, Least Frequently Used (LFU), may seem detrimental to low popularity objects, even though they significantly decrease the overall link load [3]. In this paper, we demonstrate that globally achieving LFU is a first stage of content-wise fairness. Indeed, any investigated content-wise α-fair throughput allocation permanently stores the most popular contents in network caches by ensuring them a cache hit ratio of 1. As ICN caching traditionally pursues LFU objectives, content-wise fairness specifics remain only a matter of fair bandwidth sharing, keeping the cache management intact.

Peer-Assisted Information-Centric Network (PICN): A Backward Compatible Solution

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a promising solution for most of Internet applications where the content represents the core of the application. However, the proposed solutions for the ICN architecture are associated with many complexities including pervasive caching in the Internet and incompatibility with legacy IP networks, so the deployment of ICN in real networks is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a backward-compatible ICN architecture to address the caching issue in particular. The key idea is implementing edge caching in ICN, using a coalition of end clients and edge servers. Our solution can be deployed in IP networks with HTTP requests. We performed a trace-driven simulation for analyzing peer-assisted information-centric networking (PICN) benefits using IRCache and Berkeley trace files. The results show that on average, PICN decreases the latency for 78% and increases the content retrieval speed for 69% compared with a direct download from the original Web servers. When comparing PICN with a solution based on central proxy servers, we show that the hit ratio obtained using a small cache size in each PICN client is almost 14% higher than the hit ratio obtained with a central proxy server using an unlimited cache storage.

Neighborhood-Based In-Network Caching for Information-Centric Networks

The current Internet is based on host-centric networking, and a user needs to know the host address before reaching a data target in the network. The new architecture of information-centric networking (ICN) facilitates users to locate data targets by giving their data names without any information about host addresses. In-network caching is one of the prominent features in ICN, which allows network routers to cache data contents. In this paper, we emphasize the management of in-network cache storage, and this includes the mechanisms of cache replacement and cache replication. A new cost function is then proposed to evaluate each cache content and the least valuable content is evicted when cache is full. To increase cache utilization, a cooperative caching policy among neighboring routers is proposed. The proper network locations to cache data contents are also discussed in the paper. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed caching policy than some traditional caching polices.

Evaluation of the Caching Placement Algorithms in Named Data Network for Video on Demand Service

In the existing literature for Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures improvement metrics are well researched and studied including the cache hit rate, origin server load reduction, and the reduction in the overall network footprint [1]. Metrics could be optimized using various aspects of caching including the content placement to make a decision which routers should cache the content on a request patch [2-5]. Impact of different ICN caching placement strategies on the main cloud TV performance metrics is deeply researched in this work, and results are presented. Seven cache placement algorithms are evaluated including four cache sizes of 1 GB, 10 GB, 100 GB, and 1 TB.

Timing Attacks on Access Privacy in Information Centric Networks and Countermeasures

In recently proposed information centric networks (ICN), a user issues “interest” packets to retrieve contents from network by names. Once fetched from origin servers, “data” packets are replicated and cached in all routers along routing and forwarding paths, thus allowing further interests from other users to be fulfilled quickly. However, the way ICN caching and interest fulfillment work poses a great privacy risk: the time difference between responses for an interest of cached and uncached content can be used as an indicator to infer whether or not a near-by user has previously requested the same content as that requested by an adversary. This work introduces the extent to which the problem is applicable in ICN and provides several solutions that try to strike a balance between cost and benefits, and raise the bar for an adversary to apply such attack.

Integrated network coding and caching in information-centric networks: revisiting pervasive caching in the ICN framework

Information-centric networks (ICNs) replace IP addresses with content names at the thin waist of the Internet hourglass, thereby enabling pervasive router-level caching at the network layer. In this paper, we revisit pervasive content caching and propose an algorithm for cache replacement at ICN routers by incorporating principles from network coding, a technique used to achieve maximum flow rates in multicast. By introducing a low computational cost in the system, network-coded caching better utilizes the available small storage space at the routers to cache more effectively in the network. Results of our experiments on the global enterprise for network innovations (GENI) testbed demonstrating the performance of our algorithm on a real network are included in the paper. We evaluate the algorithm in two different traffic scenarios (i) video-on-demand (VoD) (ii) Zipf-based web traffic. Working with the named data networking implementation of ICN, we also present the additional headers and logical components that are needed to enable network-coded caching. In a nutshell, we show that an integrated coding-and-caching strategy can provide significant gains in latency and content delivery rate for a small computational overhead.

Survey on caching approaches in Information Centric Networking

Information Centric Network (ICN) is increasingly becoming the alternative paradigm to the traditional Internet through improving information (content) dissemination on the Internet with names. The need to reduce redundancy and frequent access to a host (provider of information) has raised an alternative of a man-in-middle concept of ICN. This has necessitated the introduction of some ICN popular architectures (such as Named Data Network (NDN), Content Centric Network (CCN), to name a few) to manage the salient advantages incorporated in ICN. Despite all efforts and issues in naming, security, routing and mobility, power consumption; caching has become the leading variable to fully actualize the future Internet dream by carefully solving the problems in frequency and recency (in objects). Determining what part of the content is to be cached? When is the most appropriate time for caching? How would the object be cached (placed and replaced) and also what path would the object be cached? Thus, this paper span through some selected ICN architectures and projects to investigate and suggest forms of caching in minimizing the total bandwidth consumption, enhanced Delivery of Service (DoS), reduced upwards and downward streaming. In conclusion, pointing out some of the future probable ways to improve caching in ICN. This survey also highlighted the top sensitive issues that influence the active deployment of caches in ICN through recency, frequency, content size, cost of retrieval and coordination, update in caches and replacements. Several cache characteristics were further presented in ways that would improve cache techniques, deployments as research suggestions for content placement, replacement and quick scan on nodes on and off-path of the network.