Dynamic popularity window and distance-based efficient caching for fast content delivery applications in CCN

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is being established as an emerging Internet architecture that brings efficient data retrieval technology to access the contents with their names. In CCN, the in-network caching capability plays a critical role in the improvement of network performance by reducing the load of content server and increasing the content availability. Thus, the efficiency of the content caching strategy crucially affects the performance of the entire network. Towards this, a novel content caching scheme has been proposed in this article that efficiently utilizes the available caching capacity and improves Quality-of-Service (QoS) during content delivery. To perform optimized caching operations, the proposed scheme considers a dynamic threshold value and takes caching decisions based on two parameters, first is a novel dynamic size popularity window to determine content popularity, and secondly, the distance navigated by the Content message from the preceding on-path router that cached the content copy. For content caching decisions, the dynamic threshold value decreases with an increase in Content message distance from the preceding on-path router (that cached the content) and the content popularity. Using these heuristics, the scheme places the popular contents near the edges of the network. Through extensive simulations, the QoS delivered by the proposed scheme has been examined for different cache sizes on standard Abilene network topology. The results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing caching strategies for various performance parameters such as hit-ratio, average network delay, hop count, and average traffic generated in the network. This makes the proposed solution suitable for futuristic Internet architectures with 5G/6G and Industry 4.0 revolutions and their applications where faster content deliveries are required.