Icarus: A Caching simulator for Information Centric Networking (ICN)

Abstract

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a new networking paradigm proposing a shift of the main network abstraction from host identifiers to location-agnostic content identifiers. So far, several architectures have been proposed implementing this paradigm shift. A key feature, common to all proposed architectures, is the in-network caching capability, enabled by the locationagnostic, explicit naming of contents. This aspect, in particular, has recently received considerable attention by the research community. However, despite this wide interest, there is a shortage of publicly-available tools suitable for evaluating the performance of caching systems effectively. In fact, all available simulators or emulators are either bound to a specific architecture or cannot execute simulations at the scale required and within a reasonable time-frame. To address these issues, we present Icarus, a Python-based caching simulator for ICN. Icarus allows users to evaluate caching strategies for any ICN implementation and also provides modelling tools useful for caching research.