On the Throughput Capacity of Information-Centric Networks

Wireless information-centric networks consider storage one of the network primitives, and propose to cache data within the network in order to improve latency to access content and reduce bandwidth consumption. We study the throughput capacity of an information-centric network when the data cached in each node has a limited lifetime. The results show that with some fixed request and cache expiration rates, the network can have the maximum throughput order of 1/root n and 1/log n in cases of grid and random networks, respectively. Comparing these values with the corresponding throughput with no cache capability (1/n and 1/root n log n respectively), we can actually quantify the asymptotic advantage of caching. Moreover, since the request rates will decrease as a result of increasing download delays, increasing the content lifetimes according to the network growth may result in higher throughput capacities.