Cache capacity-aware CCN: Selective caching and cache-aware routing

Content-centric networking (CCN) is a new networking paradigm to resolve the data traffic explosion problem of the Internet caused by rapid increase in file sharing and video streaming traffic. Networks with CCN avoid delivery of the same contents on one link as many times as they are requested, as contents can be stored and transferred by the cache of CCN routers. Two major features that are currently considered in CCN are in-network caching and content-aware routing. Even though both aspects are important, there is little work on the comprehensive interaction between them. In this paper, we propose the cache capacity-aware CCN which consists of selective caching and cache-aware routing methods that interacts with each other to encompass cache management and cache-aware request forwarding. The main motivation of the proposed scheme is to utilize the network caches evenly and redirect a content request based on the past forwarding of the desired contents (or chunks). To enable this function, we utilize a cache capacity metric which is collected on forwarded content requests and reflected in the content replication with popularity information from content server. We evaluate the proposed scheme against existing cache replication algorithms and show that it leads to better utilization of network caches with significant performance improvements.