Socially-aware caching strategy for content centric networking

Content Centric Networking (CCN) emerged as a replacement architecture for the current Internet. CCN resorts to in-network caching to enhance end-user delivery performance. At the same time, Online Social Networks (OSN) have become the common paradigm to exchange information between users. OSNs carry extremely valuable information about their users and their relationships. This knowledge can help to drastically improve the efficiency of CCN. We present a novel caching strategy for CCN based on social information. We conjecture a small number of users - the Influential users - dominate the activity, receive most attention from other users and produce content more likely to be consumed. Our caching strategy privileges the Influential users and cache pro-actively their content in the network. Through extensive simulation experiments based on two social network scenarios, LastFM and Facebook, and substantial number of users in a CCN topology, we demonstrate the value of our approach. We also implemented and deployed our strategy on PlanetLab and it improves drastically the caching performances of CCN.