Active breadcrumbs: Aggressive distribution method of in-network guidance information for content-oriented networks

Lately, access loads on servers and network traffic are increasing due to larger content-size and higher request-frequency in content distribution networks. Breadcrumbs (an architecture with guidance information for locating a content cache) is designed to reduce server-loads and to form content oriented network autonomously in cooperation with cached contents. We also proposed Breadcrumbs+ which solves BC´s problem that queries visit the same routers repeatedly with forming a loop of routing. However, Breadcrumbs itself still has a technical issue that some queries potentially traverse longer hops compared to conventional approach. In addition, Breadcrumbs takes only a passive approach; a query is routed by a trail of BCs only when the query happens to encounter a corresponding BC. This indicates that Breadcrumbs has a space to enhance its capability. We expect that active and adaptive control of BC improves user experience. In this paper, we propose Active Breadcrumbs which provides higher cache utilization through active spreading guidance information around cache-nodes. Finally, we show the effectiveness of Active Breadcrumbs in terms of traversing content/query hops and server utilization through the extensive computer simulation.