Towards exploring the benefits of scope-flooding in Information-Centric Networks

Approaches to Information-Centric Networking (ICN) employ caches within a network to reduce transfers of information from a source to consumers. Copies of content within a network may be exploited through the use of a forwarding mechanism. Scope-flooding is a forwarding strategy based on the distribution of requests through flooding. The scope of the flooding is defined through a scope-value which prevents network-wide flooding. In this paper, we investigate the impact of scope-flooding forwarding against Shortest-Path Routing (SPR) using a number of on-path caching policies. Our results show that scope-flooding does not always benefit the performance of a caching policy, as stated so far. We conclude by discussing a number of features that may be adopted to enhance the performance of scope-flooding.