Minimizing bandwidth on peering links with deflection in named data networking

Content dissemination is the primary usage of the Internet today, whereas the existing Internet architecture based on TCP/IP is mainly designed for point-to-point communications. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has been proposed to conciliate Internet usage and technology. The idea behind ICN is to omit the notion of host and location and establish content as the first class citizen of the network. ICN advocates in-network caching, i.e., to cache content on the path from content providers to requesters. This on-path caching achieves good overall performance but is not optimal as content may be replicated on routers so reducing the total volume of content that can be cached. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the notion of off-path caching where we allocate content to well defined off-path caches within the network and deflect the traffic off the optimal path toward these caches that are spread across the network. Off-path caching improves the global hit ratio by efficiently utilizing the network-wide available caching capacity and permits to reduce egress links´ bandwidth usage.