Hybrid caching and requests forwarding in information centric networking

Content Centric Networking (CCN) is one of the most promising network architectures of future Internet. In CCN, Content Router (CR) floods request in the network to find the content. This flooding may degrade the network performance by generating too much traffic. Also, in legacy CCN architecture, each CR caches all contents that pass through it. Thus, same contents are replicated in all CRs along the request path, which incurs faster cache replacement and degrades cache utilization consequently. Furthermore, caching and forwarding decisions are made by the CR only on the basis of its local knowledge, which may not be optimum decisions. In this paper we propose a hybrid caching, cache replacement and requests forwarding approaches to overcome the above drawbacks. In our proposal, there is a virtual controller inside the data center with high performance computational capacity. The controller makes all the forwarding and caching decisions and passes it to the physical CRs via virtualized core router. Physical CRs are grouped inside regions on the basis of their geographical location, in order to enhance users' QoE. We have intensively simulated the proposed mechanism in a chunk level simulator and the performance is compared with existing schemes. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism outperforms the existing state-of-the-art schemes.