Coordinating In-Network Caching in Content-Centric Networks: Model and Analysis

In-network content storage has become an inherent capability of routers in the content-centric networking architecture. This raises new challenges in utilizing and provisioning the in-network caching capability, namely, how to optimally provision individual routers' storage to cache contents, so as to balance the trade-offs between the network performance and the provisioning cost. To address this problem, we first propose a holistic model to characterize the network performance of routing contents to clients and the network cost incurred by globally coordinating the in-network storage capability. We then derive the optimal strategy for provisioning the storage capability that optimizes the overall network performance and cost, and analyze the performance gains via numerical evaluations on real network topologies. Our results reveal interesting phenomena; for instance, different ranges of the Zipf exponent can lead to opposite optimal strategies, and the trade-offs between the network performance and the provisioning cost have great impacts on the stability of the optimal strategy. We also demonstrate that the optimal strategy can achieve significant gain on both the load reduction at origin servers and the improvement on the routing performance.