Opportunistic On-Path Caching for Named Data Networking

Abstract

As a prominent feature of Named Data Networking (NDN), in-network caching plays an important role in improving the performance of content delivery. However, if each NDN router indiscriminately caches every data packet passing by (i.e., Caching Everything Everywhere (CEE)), the result can be unnecessarily frequent cache replacement and cache redundancy in en-route routers and thus in-network caches are not utilized in an efficient way [1], [2]. Moreover, managing these in-network caches in a centralized way may lead to excessive resource consumption since the number of these caches is considerable. This work proposes a distributed and opportunistic on-path caching scheme. To be specific, each en-route router independently picks content items to cache in such a way that popular content is more likely to be cached by routers, especially routers near users, and cache redundancy is reduced. Extensive simulations including trace-driven ones in a PoP-level ISP topology suggest that the proposed scheme improves the average cache hit ratio of users' requests and reduces the average hop count as compared to CEE and the other on-path caching algorithms considered herein.