Cache Nodes Research Articles

Trailblazer: A proactive caching, blockchain, minimum content retrieval latency, and energy cost-aware resource and job orchestration scheme for publisher-subscriber based 6G ICN services

With the rise of information-centric networks (ICN), the user can access the caching content from nearby caching nodes rather than the remote content server through in-network caching facilities. The existing articles did not look into minimum caching content retrieval latency, user energy consumption, user financial cost, and maximum service provider profit-aware proper resource orchestration and job scheduling policies all at once, taking into account multiple publishers and subscriber-based caching jobs, blockchain, user-owned and service provider cache, pre-caching, neighbor collaboration, and available resources. To suppress these challenges, this article offers a proactive pre-caching, collaboration, blockchain, minimum latency-aware resource, and job scheduling policy for 6G ICN services that takes into account publishers’ and subscribers’ caching job requests, user-owned and service provider cache, available resources, and deadline. The experimental results visualized that at least 16% content retrieval delay, 66% energy, and 22% service provider profit gain are attained in the proposed scheme over the existing techniques.

Performance Analysis of Internet of Vehicles Mesh Networks Based on Actual Switch Models

The rapid growth of the automotive industry has exacerbated the conflict between the complex traffic environment, increasing communication demands, and limited resources. Given the imperative to mitigate traffic and network congestion, analyzing the performance of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) mesh networks is of great practical significance. Most studies focus solely on individual performance metrics and influencing factors, and the adopted simulation tools, such as OPNET, cannot achieve the dynamic link generation of IoV mesh networks. To address these problems, a network performance analysis model based on actual switches is proposed. First, a typical IoV mesh network architecture is constructed and abstracted into a mathematical model that describes how the link and topology changes over time. Then, the task generation model and the task forwarding model based on actual switches are proposed to obtain the real traffic distribution of the network. Finally, a scientific network performance indicator system is constructed. Simulation results demonstrate that, with rising task traffic and decreasing node caching capacity, the packet loss rate increases, and the task arrival rate decreases in the network. The proposed model can effectively evaluate the network performance across various traffic states and provide valuable insights for network construction and enhancement.

Artificial Intelligence in Next-Generation Networking: Energy Efficiency Optimization in IoT Networks Using Hybrid LEACH Protocol

The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is significantly transforming the landscape of future networking. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technological paradigm that encompasses embedded systems, wireless sensors, and automation, facilitating the integration of various applications ranging from smart homes to wearable devices. In addition, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) amplifies this influence by providing data-driven analytics, optimising processes, and presenting novel opportunities for growth. Nevertheless, the widespread adoption of devices within Internet of Things (IoT) networks gives rise to apprehensions regarding increased energy consumption. In order to ensure the longevity of network operations, it is imperative to employ energy-efficient protocols for sensor nodes that possess limited power resources. One example of a protocol that demonstrates this concept is the Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol. This protocol effectively divides networks into clusters and dynamically adjusts the cluster heads to optimise the transmission of data to the base stations. Our study enhances the LEACH protocol by incorporating digital twin simulation, thereby enhancing the efficiency of IoT systems. Virtual network models and AI analytics are employed to assess energy consumption and performance. Cache nodes play a crucial role within this framework as they collect data from cluster heads in order to transmit it to the base station. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and simulation techniques, we are able to improve the energy efficiency and reliability of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems. The findings indicate a significant reduction of 83% in non-functioning nodes and a notable increase of 1.66 times in energy levels of nodes compared to conventional approaches. This study highlights a potential direction for energy-efficient, AI-enhanced Internet of Things (IoT) networking through the utilisation of the Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol.

Cache Optimization Methods Involving Node and Content Sharding of Blockchain in Internet of Vehicles

Blockchain stands out in addressing the data security requirements of the Internet of Vehicles. However, blockchain has storage pressure that cannot be met by most existing nodes. The emergence of Mobile Edge Computing allows nodes closer to the users to undertake the caching and computation process. Although sharding can alleviate the storage pressure on blockchain nodes, frequent cross-shard communication can affect the overall performance of the blockchain. In this paper, combining the features of traffic flow with strong regional similarity as well as inter-node correlation, we propose two sharding methods based on the current Vehicle–Infrastructure–Clouds three-tier service model. The proposed Content Sharding method can optimize node caching and improve the cache-hitting ratio. The proposed node sharding method can effectively reduce the system service delay by assisting nodes to cache the whole blockchain together across the network.

Prediction-Based Cooperative Cache Discovery in VANETs for Social Networking

Social media traffic is increasingly pervading the Internet. Such traffic is mostly generated by mobile devices, which creates immense traffic load on backhaul links in 5G networks. This load can be mitigated by using vehicular networks as a traffic offloading platform, where intelligent vehicles can act as a valuable asset that can bring the data closer to the requester via edge caching. In this paper, we propose the Prediction-Assisted Cooperative Content Discovery (PACD) scheme. PACD exploits the static and mobile nature of parked and moving vehicles, respectively, to promulgate cached content information into the network via bloom filters. PACD is the first scheme that leverages such information to perform cooperative cache discovery to locate closer replicas to the requester by dynamically predicting the location of caching nodes. The Any Relation Clustering Algorithm (ARCA) is employed to cluster trips based on their route similarity using the XXDice similarity coefficient. Each cluster is then trained using the Mixture Transition Distribution-Probit (MTD-Probit) model to predict the remaining trajectory of vehicles. Using these predictions, PACD tracks all possible data providers and ranks them based on their proximity to the requester, as well as their prediction entropy. Extensive evaluations show that PACD yields significant improvements of up to 86%, 30%, 42%, and 16% in terms of delay, packet delivery ratio, cache hit ratio, and prediction accuracy, respectively, compared to prominent caching and prediction schemes in vehicular networks.

Community Detection and Attention-Weighted Federated Learning Based Proactive Edge Caching for D2D-Assisted Wireless Networks

This work investigates proactive edge caching for D2D-assisted wireless networks, where user equipments (UEs) can be selected as caching nodes to assist content delivery. The objective of this work is to achieve a trade-off between the cost for providing caching services and the content transmission latency. Doing so, there are two challenges: 1) Which UEs can be selected as caching nodes; 2) How to place contents on these selected UEs without user’s privacy disclosure. To address these, a novel community detection and attention-weighted federated learning based proactive edge caching (CAFLPC) strategy is proposed. In the strategy, we first group UEs into different communities based on both the mobility and social properties of UEs, and then select important users (IUs) as caching nodes for each community by considering the social importance of UEs. To determine how to place the popular contents in these selected IUs, an attention-weighted federated learning (AWFL) based content popularity prediction framework is proposed. It integrates the attention-weighted federated learning with Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory Network (AWFL_BiLSTM) to achieve a higher content popularity prediction accuracy while protecting user’s privacy. Considering the imbalance of UEs’ active levels and local computing capacities, an attention-weighted aggregation mechanism is proposed to improve the training efficiency and prediction accuracy. Simulations results show that the proposed CAFLPC strategy outperforms the compared existing caching strategies at about 2.2%-35.1% in terms of the transmission latency reduced by per unit cost.

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.

Collaborative caching relay algorithm based on recursive deep reinforcement learning in mobile vehicle edge network

With the rapid development of Internet of vehicles (IoV) and the continuous emergence of vehicle information applications, the demand for content in vehicle networking is growing at an alarming speed. Mobile vehicular edge caching is regarded as a promising technology in improving Quality of Service (QoS) and reducing latency. Many caching algorithms have been proposed, which usually place contents in the Road Side Units (RSUs) to provide services to users near them. However, due to the high-speed movement of vehicles and limitations of RSU coverage, caching interrupts often occur frequently, leading to a deterioration in service quality. To deal with this problem, we make full use of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) collaboration to construct a caching system which does not require RSU support, and propose a Recursive Deep Reinforcement Learning based Collaborative Caching Relay strategy (RDRL-CR). On purpose to minimize the service delay under capacity constraints, the caching problem is formulated as an integer linear programming problem, and caching decisions are achieved through partially observable Markov Decision Process (MDP). Specifically, this strategy utilizes a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to predict vehicle trajectories, and then selects vehicles that can serve as caching nodes by calculating link stability metrics between vehicles. The Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network is embedded into a deep deterministic strategy gradient algorithm to achieve the final caching decision. Compared with existing caching strategies, the proposed caching strategy in this paper improves the caching hit rate by about 25% and reduces content access latency by about 20%.

Multi-User PIR with Cyclic Wraparound Multi-Access Caches.

We consider the problem of multi-access cache-aided multi-user Private Information Retrieval (MACAMuPIR) with cyclic wraparound cache access. In MACAMuPIR, several files are replicated across multiple servers. There are multiple users and multiple cache nodes. When the network is not congested, servers fill these cache nodes with the content of the files. During peak network traffic, each user accesses several cache nodes. Every user wants to retrieve one file from the servers but does not want the servers to know their demands. This paper proposes a private retrieval scheme for MACAMuPIR and characterizes the transmission cost for multi-access systems with cyclic wraparound cache access. We formalize privacy and correctness constraints and analyze transmission costs. The scheme outperforms the previously known dedicated cache setup, offering efficient and private retrieval. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the multi-access approach. Our research contributes an efficient, privacy-preserving solution for multi-user PIR, advancing secure data retrieval from distributed servers.

SoftCaching: A framework for caching node selection and routing in Software-Defined Information Centric Internet of Things

A considerable demand for Internet of Things (IoT) services is causing exponential growth in Internet traffic. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) are complementary technologies for IoT services provisioning that reduce network traffic and service provisioning delays by caching content at intermediate nodes in the network. Existing research on Software-Defined Information-Centric Networking (SDICN) for IoT service provisioning suffers from two major challenges: (a) optimal caching node selection and (b) optimal path computation from content consumers to caching nodes based on end-to-end delay and link utilization constraints. We propose a SoftCaching framework that optimizes caching node selection for content publishers and computes the optimal routing path to caching nodes for content consumers. It computes optimal locations for caching nodes and finds optimal routing paths for IoT services to access cached content. SoftCaching analyzes network traffic on all nodes in the network and collects traffic metrics. It estimates the best possible caching nodes by using Waypoint Enforcement (WPE) and solving the traffic matrix using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and QR Factorization. WPE and SVD-based QR factorization provide optimal locations to cache the content for IoT services. Subsequently, SoftCaching uses a constraint-based shortest path algorithm to compute the optimal routing path from content consumers to caching nodes. We make sure that the caching node and the routing path selection follow delay and link utilization constraints. We perform extensive experiments for evaluation, and the results show that SoftCaching outperforms state-of-the-art caching schemes in terms of delay, link load, hop count, path stretch, and energy consumption metrics.

Cache Placement in an NDN-Based LEO Satellite Network Constellation

The efforts to replace the successful, albeit aging, TCP/IP Internet architecture with a better suited one have driving research interest to information-centric alternatives. The Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture is probably one of the main contenders to become the network layer of the future Internet thanks to its inbuilt support for mobility, in-network caching, security and, in general, for being better adapted to the needs of current network applications. At the same time, massive satellite constellations are currently being deployed in low Earth orbits (LEO) to provide a backend for network connectivity. It is expected that, very soon, these constellations will function as proper networks thanks to inter-satellite communication links. These new satellite networks will be able to benefit from their greenfield status and the new network architectures. In this paper we analyze how to deploy the network caches of an NDN-based LEO satellite network. In particular, we show how we can jointly select the most appropriate caching nodes for each piece of content and how to forward data across the constellation in two simple alternative ways. Performance results show that the caching and forwarding strategies proposed reduce path lengths up to a third with just a few caching nodes while, simultaneously, helping to spread the load along the network.

User-Preference-Learning-Based Proactive Edge Caching for D2D-Assisted Wireless Networks

This work investigates proactive edge caching for device-to-device (D2D) assisted wireless networks, where user equipment (UE) can be selected as caching nodes to assist content delivery to reduce the content transmission latency. In doing so, there are two challenges: 1) How to precisely get the user’s preference to cache the proper contents at UEs; 2) How to replace the contents cached at UEs when there are new popular contents emerging. To address these, we develop a user preference learning-based proactive edge caching (UPL-PEC) strategy. In the strategy, we first propose a novel context and social-aware user preference learning method to precisely predict user’s dynamic preferences by jointly exploiting the context correlation among different contents, the influence of social relationships and the time-sequential patterns of user’s content requests. Specifically, the bidirectional long short term memory networks are adopted to capture the time-sequential patterns of the user’s content requests. And, the graph convolutional networks are developed to capture the high-order similarity representation among different contents from the constructed content graph. To learn the social influence representation, an attention mechanism is designed to generate the social influence weights to users with different social relationship. Based on the learned user preference, a proactive edge caching architecture is proposed to integrate the offline caching content placement and the online caching content replacement policy to continuously cache the popular contents at UEs. Simulation results show that the proposed UPL-PEC strategy outperforms the existing similar caching strategies at about 3.13%-4.62% in terms of the average content transmission latency.

An effective data communication community establishment scheme in opportunistic networks

AbstractThe network transmission speed has been greatly improved, thanks to the power of 5G technology. The millisecond‐level communication delay has made a qualitative leap in communication quality. However, the sharp increase in the number of nodes connected to the internet has resulted in an explosion of traffic. Ensuring stable network transmission in the face of large data volumes has become an urgent problem to be solved. Existing research mainly optimizes for low data volumes of nodes, and cannot dynamically adapt to node transmission load to cope with explosive growth. This is because the node's cache is always at a high level, which causes community communication to be blocked. To address this issue, the authors have designed an effective data communication community establishment scheme. By adding a data information flow (DIF) attribute to each user and using the dynamic feedback adjustment (DFA) mechanism, the authors can combine the entire communication community and control the user's data information flow concentration at a relatively low level. This degree of optimization ensures that the user node maintains a relatively stable state for fast communication.The authors design an effective data communication community establishment scheme. By adding a data information flow (DIF) attribute to each user, using the dynamic feedback adjustment mechanism and combining the entire communication community, the user's data information flow concentration is controlled at a relatively low level.

Cooperative caching strategy based mobile vehicle social‐aware in internet of vehicles

AbstractThe dramatic growth of smart in‐vehicle applications in the Internet of Vehicles and the increasing quality of experience for vehicle users have put a huge traffic load on the mobile core network. Mobile edge caching has been proposed to place content at the edge of the network to serve users in close proximity to them. However, the dynamic topology of existing edge networks and the inherent storage limitations of edge devices pose a serious challenge to vehicular edge caching. Therefore, in this article, we propose a cooperative caching strategy based on mobile prediction and social awareness that allows collaborative content decision making among edge devices. Specifically, the long short‐term memory network is used to predict vehicle trajectories, social relationships are computed using content similarity and contact rates among vehicle users to select vehicles that can serve as caching nodes, and deep reinforcement learning is employed to achieve the final caching decision. Simulation results show that the caching strategy proposed in this article achieves up to 7.7%, 24.2%, and 27.3% gains, respectively, in terms of content acquirement delay compared to the reinforcement learning algorithm, the algorithm without considering mobility, and the non‐cooperative algorithm.

Heterogeneous Cluster-Based Information-Centric Sensor Networks With User Security Satisfaction

In heterogeneous cluster-based Information-Centric Wireless Sensor Networks (ICWSNs), sensor nodes acquire different application-specific data. They are clustered based on proximity, where cluster heads act as cache nodes. Meanwhile, grouping sensor nodes based on the information type gathered can improve the ICWSN performance. Motivated by the heterogeneous nature of ICWSNs, application-specific communities can be formed within each cluster, where community leaders can be selected to cache application-specific data. In this case, cluster heads gather aggregated data from community leaders rather than basic sensing nodes. However, this creates an issue of the energy-latency and security trade-off and affects user security satisfaction. In this work, we propose solving this issue by studying cluster-based ICWSNs with heterogeneous communities and comparing them to conventional heterogeneous cluster-based ICWSNs. Based on the formulated analytical model, we then propose SLAC-H, a Security Level Aware cluster heads’ and community leaders’ selection algorithm for Cluster-based ICWSNs with Heterogeneous communities. SLAC-H addresses the energy-latency and security issue by optimizing energy and coverage supported by sensor nodes in a cluster-based ICWSN with heterogeneous communities subject to security constraints. Simulation results show that compared to existing works, SLAC-H achieves lower latency and energy consumption while fulfilling higher user security satisfaction.

Caching Scalable Videos in the Edge of Wireless Cellular Networks

By pre-fetching popular videos into the local caches of edge nodes, wireless edge caching provides an effective means of reducing repeated content deliveries. To meet the various viewing quality requirements of multimedia users, scalable video coding (SVC) is integrated with edge caching, where the constituent layers of scalable videos are flexibly cached and transmitted to users. In this article, we discuss the challenges arising from the different content popularity and various viewing requirements of scalable videos, and present the diverse types of cached contents as well as the corresponding transmission schemes. We provide an overview of the existing caching schemes, and summarize the criteria of making caching decisions. A case study is then presented, where the transmission delay is quantified and used as the performance metric. Simulation results confirm that giving cognizance to the realistic requirements of end users is capable of significantly reducing the content transmission delay, compared to the existing caching schemes operating without SVC. The results also verify that the transmission delay of the proposed random caching scheme is lower than that of the caching scheme which only provides local caching gain.

Efficient congestion control scheme based on caching strategy in NDN

As a pioneering network architecture, Named Data Networking (NDN) leverages the content-centric model and connectionless transmission mode to enhance network capacity. Despite the emergence of numerous congestion control protocols aimed at improving NDN transmission efficiency, most of these approaches implicitly assume that each interest packet elicits one single data packet, which significantly restricts network performance. To address this issue, we introduce C3NDN, a Congestion Control scheme that leverages caching strategy in NDN. C3NDN formulates a One-Interest-Multiple-Data model to improve network efficiency, and employs a probabilistic caching strategy to cache popular content at important nodes and optimize the in-network caching characteristic of NDN. Furthermore, C3NDN incorporates a congestion control algorithm based on the One-Interest-Multiple-Data model, which considers the bandwidth and delay information of the transmission path. Additionally, C3NDN implements a marking method that takes full advantage of node cache and reduces transmission time. Extensive experiments have been conducted to show the performance of C3NDN, and the results demonstrate that C3NDN can reduce the transmission time by up to 41.68% when compared with the other congestion control schemes.

Cooperative content caching and delivery in vehicular networks: A deep neural network approach

The growing demand for low delay vehicular content has put tremendous strain on the backbone network. As a promising alternative, cooperative content caching among different cache nodes can reduce content access delay. However, heterogeneous cache nodes have different communication modes and limited caching capacities. In addition, the high mobility of vehicles renders the more complicated caching environment. Therefore, performing efficient cooperative caching becomes a key issue. In this paper, we propose a cross-tier cooperative caching architecture for all contents, which allows the distributed cache nodes to cooperate. Then, we devise the communication link and content caching model to facilitate timely content delivery. Aiming at minimizing transmission delay and cache cost, an optimization problem is formulated. Furthermore, we use a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) approach to model the decision-making process for caching among heterogeneous cache nodes, where each agent interacts with the environment collectively, receives observations yet a common reward, and learns its own optimal policy. Extensive simulations validate that the MADRL approach can enhance hit ratio while reducing transmission delay and cache cost.

An Efficient Load-Balancing Scheme for UAVs in 5G Infrastructure

Deploying caches at the macro base station (MBS), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and mobile user caches can effectively reduce the retransmission of duplicate content in the 5G cellular wireless hotspot network. As the storage capacity of MBS is much higher than UAVs and other hotspot cache nodes, the MBS advertises its vacant storage space so that the participating nodes can rent it. In this article, we proposed an efficient load-balancing scheme by using the Stackelberg equilibrium game model. The proposed scheme sets a unit price ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\xi$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) based on constraints to avoid data traffic uncertainty caused by participation nodes and rent vacant space of MBS. Furthermore, we proposed an efficient scheme for the placement and delivery of hotspot content by using Knapsack and Zipf. Moreover, ensuring the device-to-device link support also minimizes transportation costs. The results validate that considering the above-mentioned techniques significantly improves the overall hotspot network performance.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Edge Caching with Mobility Prediction in Vehicular Networks.

As vehicles are connected to the Internet, various services can be provided to users. However, if the requests of vehicle users are concentrated on the remote server, the transmission delay increases, and there is a high possibility that the delay constraint cannot be satisfied. To solve this problem, caching can be performed at a closer proximity to the user which in turn would reduce the latency by distributing requests. The road side unit (RSU) and vehicle can serve as caching nodes by providing storage space closer to users through a mobile edge computing (MEC) server and an on-board unit (OBU), respectively. In this paper, we propose a caching strategy for both RSUs and vehicles with the goal of maximizing the caching node throughput. The vehicles move at a greater speed; thus, if positions of the vehicles are predictable in advance, this helps to determine the location and type of content that has to be cached. By using the temporal and spatial characteristics of vehicles, we adopted a long short-term memory (LSTM) to predict the locations of the vehicles. To respond to time-varying content popularity, a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) was used to determine the size of each piece of content to be stored in the caching nodes. Experiments in various environments have proven that the proposed algorithm performs better when compared to other caching methods in terms of the throughput of caching nodes, delay constraint satisfaction, and update cost.