Cooperative caching through routing control in information-centric networks

Information-centric network (ICN), which is one of the prominent Internet re-design architectures, relies on in-network caching for its fundamental operation. However, previous works argue that the performance of in-network caching is highly degraded with the current cache-along-default-path design, which makes popular objects to be cached redundantly in many places. Thus, it would be beneficial to have a distributed and uncoordinated design. Although cooperative caches could be an answer to this, previous research showed that they are generally unfeasible due to excessive signaling burden, protocol complexity, and a need for fault tolerance. In this work we illustrate the ICN caching problem, and propose a novel architecture to overcome the problem of uncooperative caches. Our design possesses the cooperation property intrinsically. We utilize controlled off-path caching to achieve almost 9-fold increase in cache efficiency, and around 20% increase in server load reduction when compared to the classic on-path caching used in ICN proposals.