2020 Volume 28 Pages 570-576
In recent years, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) that mainly focuses on contents that are transferred and received instead of on end hosts that transmit and receive contents has been under the spotlight. A straightforward approach for content routing in ICNs is to utilize a class of shortest-path routing mechanisms. In past research papers, several cache-aware routing mechanisms for ICNs to take advantage of content caches at intermediate routers have been proposed. In past studies, however, only link-level performance metrics (e.g., cache hit ratio and server load) of content routings have been investigated. Hence, it has been still unclear how the shortest-path routing is effective (or ineffective) in terms of application-level performance metrics. In this paper, we try to answer research questions regarding the optimality of the shortest-path routing. We compare the application-level performances with the shortest-path routing and with the optimal routing obtained by searching all detour paths existing in the vicinity of the shortest-path routing (optimal k-hop detour routing). Our findings include that the shortest-path routing is suitable when the network is balanced and cache sizes at routers are homogeneous, and that the optimal k-hop detour routing is suitable when variation in cache sizes is large.
