A dive into the caching performance of Content Centric Networking

Content Centric Networking (CCN) is a promising architecture for the diffusion of popular content over the Internet. While CCN system design is sound, gathering a reliable estimate of its performance in the current Internet is challenging, due to the large scale and to the lack of agreement in some critical elements of the evaluation scenario. In this work, we add a number of important pieces to the CCN puzzle by means of a chunk-level simulator that we make available to the scientific community as open source software. First, we pay special attention to the locality of the user request process, as it may be determined by user interest or language barrier. Second, we consider the existence of possibly multiple repositories for the same content, as in the current Internet, along with different CCN interest forwarding policies, exploiting either a single or multiple repositories in parallel. To widen the relevance of our findings, we consider multiple topologies, content popularity settings, caching replacement policies and CCN forwarding strategies. Summarizing our main result, though the use of multiple content repositories can be beneficial from the user point of view, it may however counter part of the benefits if the CCN strategy layer implements naive interest forwarding policies.