ICN Based Efficient Content Caching Scheme for Vehicular Networks

The Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a future internet architecture to support efficient content distribution in a vehicular environment. In-network caching in ICN provides a realistic solution for vehicular communication due to storage of content replicas inside network vehicles. However, the challenge still exists while caching content replicas in resource constraint vehicles (such as limited power and cache capacity) to minimize the communication latency. To address the above mentioned challenge, this paper proposes EPC - an ICN based Energy efficient Placement of Content chunk that fits well in a vehicular environment. The proposed resource management strategy mainly aims to reduce the content fetching delay by caching content replicas towards the network edge router. The EPC strategy decides on placement of content chunks on each vehicle by jointly considering residual power of current vehicle, local popularity of content, and caching gain. The EPC supports efficient utilization of network available resources by allowing only vehicles with their residual power greater than threshold to perform chunk caching and hence, further offers reduced content duplication in the whole network. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated in Icarus- an ICN simulator for analyzing the performance of ICN caching and routing strategies. The EPC outperforms various state of the art caching strategies approximately by 30% when gets evaluated in terms of offered cache hit ratio, content retrieval delay, and the average number of hops utilized for fetching the requested content.