Beyond Edge Caching: Freshness and Popularity Aware IoT Data Caching via NDN at Internet-Scale

In-network caching is one of the main pillars of the Named Data Networking (NDN) paradigm, where every Internet router, in the path between data sources and consumers, can cache incoming content packets. Multiple strategies have been designed for caching Internet of Things (IoT) data streamed by resource-constrained devices in edge domains and wireless sensor networks, while the benefits of IoT data caching at Internet-scale, including both edge and core network segments, have not been fully disclosed. In this work, we propose and analyse a novel probabilistic Internet-scale caching design for IoT data, which jointly accounts for the content popularity and lifetime. In the considered scenario, IoT contents are requested by remote consumers and delivered by crossing multiple edge and core network segments of the NDN-based future Internet. The proposal is composed of two distinct reactive caching strategies, a coordinated and an autonomous one, to be implemented in the edge and core domain, respectively. Achieved results show that the proposal outperforms state-of-the-art solutions by providing, among others, the highest cache hit ratio and the shortest number of hops. Such performances testify a lower pressure on energy-constrained devices and on the network infrastructure, overall contributing to the sustainability of the IoT ecosystem.