Is Caching a Key to Energy Reduction of NDN Networks?

Abstract

Energy efficiency is an important requirement to forth-coming NDN (Named Data Networking) networks and caching inherent to NDN is a main driver of energy reduction in such networks. This paper addresses the research question “Does caching really reduce the energy consumption of the entire network?”. To answer the question, we precisely estimate how caching reduces energy consumption of forth-coming commercial NDN networks by carefully considering configurations of NDN routers. This estimation reveals that energy reduction due to caching depends on energy-proportionality of NDN routers.