ACO-based Cache Locating Strategy for Content-Centric Networking

Content-centric Networking (CCN) is a new Internet architecture, relies on in-network caching to achieve an efficient and reliable content distribution. However, the existing forwarding strategy cannot fully sense the location of cache, because it is rely on the ports of routing table. In this paper, we propose a Bidirectional Cache Locating Algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimization (BCLA) using bidirectional ants to diffuse and exploit multiple content copies. One direction of ant called Announcing Ant is responsible for advertising the information of cached content to neighbors in a limited area, the other side, including Probing Ant and Updating Ant, are responsible for seeking cached content for the routers outside the area. Our goal is to find the optimal cache, and making efficient utilization of available cache resources within a certain area. Extensive experiments have been carried to evaluate BCLA against other forwarding strategies. The simulation results prove that BCLA outperforms other strategies in the content delivery latency, cache hit ratio, as well as the path stretch.