On-Path Collaborative In-Network Caching for Information-Centric Networks

It is a challenge for Information-Centric Network (ICN) that how to maximize the utilization of network-embedded cache. On-path collaboration is an efficient way to reduce access latency and cache redundancy. All nodes on ICN routing path work together to achieve higher performance than individual cache, and lower collaboration overhead than regional collaborative cache. In this paper, we formulate the traffic cost minimization problem in on-path collaborative caching, and give some insights of it. A caching utility function is defined with respect to content popularity and distance to content cache or source, in order to evaluate the payoff of caching an item at one of the on-path collaborative nodes. An on-path collaborative caching scheme UtilCache is proposed, which keeps ICN cache decision procedure unchanged but replaces items by the proposed policy LCU (Least Caching Utility). LCU evicts the items with least caching utility calculated by the caching utility function. The collaborative messages are piggybacked by data packets with low communication overhead. Compared with state-of-the-art caching schemes, UtilCache yields better performance in cache hit ratio, low latency and low communication overhead. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed UtilCache achieves up to 50% latency reduction compared with individual caching, and less overhead compared with other collaborative caching. It also validates the implementation of UtilCache is very easy to be seamlessly integrated in current ICN framework.