Cache-filter: A cache permission policy for information-centric networking

Abstract

Information Centric Networking (ICN) has recently attracted great attention. It names the content decoupling from the location and introduces network caching, making the content to be cached anywhere within the network. The benefits of such design are obvious, however, many challenges still need to be solved. Among them, the local caching policy is widely discussed and it can be further divided into two parts, namely the cache permission policy and the cache replacement policy. The former is used to decide whether an incoming content should be cached while the latter is used to evict a cached content if required. The Internet is a user-oriented network and popular contents always have much more requests than unpopular ones. Caching such popular contents closer to the user’s location can improve the network performance, and consequently, the local caching policy is required to identify popular contents. However, considering the line speed requirement of ICN routers, the local caching policy whose complexity is larger than O(1) cannot be applied. In terms of the replacement policy, Least Recently Used (LRU) is selected as the default one for ICN because of its low complexity, although its ability to identify the popular content is poor. Hence, the identification of popular contents should be completed by the cache permission policy. In this paper, a cache permission policy called Cache-Filter, whose complexity is O(1), is proposed, aiming to store popular contents closer to users. Cache-Filter takes the content popularity into account and achieves the goal through the collaboration of on-path nodes. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of Cache-Filter. Leave Copy Down (LCD), Move Copy Down (MCD), Betw, ProbCache, ProbCache+, Prob(p) and Probabilistic Caching with Secondary List (PCSL) are also implemented for comparison. The results show that Cache-Filter performs well. For example, in terms of the distance to access to contents, compared with Leave Copy Everywhere (LCE) used by Named Data Networking (NDN) as the permission policy, Cache-Filter saves over 17% number of hops.