Optimized content centric networking for future internet: Dynamic popularity window based caching scheme

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) has emerged as a promising future Internet architecture that concentrates on content-centric information retrieval instead of current host-based infrastructure. In-network content caching has been integrated with CCN that allows the transformation from IP-based architectures to a completely decentralized environment which is based on the Content-Centric approach for future Internet architecture. In traditional caching schemes, each intermediate router caches a copy of content before forwarding it towards the requester. However, the caching capacity of routers is much smaller as compared to the forwarded traffic through them. For comprehensive utilization of available cache space, a novel content caching scheme called DPWCS (Dynamic Popularity Window-based Caching Scheme) has been proposed that efficiently places contents in the network cache. By intelligently determining the size of popularity window using request rate and the total number of distinct contents in the network, DPWCS is able to improve network performance by caching popular contents in the routers. The proposed scheme also translates the threshold determination issue into an optimization problem and propose cache size and Zipf distribution based heuristics for its computation. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the necessity of DPWCS, as the default caching scheme is unable to achieve significant network performance with realistic request rates, cache sizes, and requests distribution patterns. It is shown that the proposed scheme increases the cache hit-ratio, hop reduction ratio and server-load reduction ratio up-to ≈ 13%, ≈ 11% and ≈ 13% from peer competing caching schemes respectively with widely accepted Least-Recently-Used (LRU) cache replacement policy and ≈ 23% reduction in average network hop count under various simulation scenarios. This makes it suitable for Industry 4.0 and futuristic Internet architectures with 5G.