A popularity-driven controller-based routing and cooperative caching for named data networks

In this work, we investigate cache admission policies and forwarding decisions that account for content popularity in order to optimize the named-based routing performances in Named Data Networks (NDN). To achieve this goal, we propose a new controller-based, neighborhood content-aware, popularity-driven routing tightly coupled with a cooperative caching strategy, named Controller-Based Caching and Forwarding Scheme (CCFS). The rationale behind our proposal is to divide the network into domains mastered by cooperative Controllers forming a Connected Dominating Set (CDS). Controllers are responsible for making judicious request forwarding decisions while holding the most popular content requested in their domains. To gauge the effectiveness of our proposal, we conducted extensive simulations. Results show that CCFS reduces the mean hit distance by up to 30% and minimizes the communication cost by up to 47 times in comparison with a prominent existing approach — COntent-driven Bloom filter based Routing Algorithm (COBRA) as well as the default NDN routing. In addition, we observe that the performances of our proposal are very close to those achieved by the Best-route forwarding scheme using location-based Dijkstra´s algorithm.