Throughput-delay tradeoffs in content-centric ad hoc wireless networks

We study the throughput and delay characteristics of wireless networks based on a content-centric network architecture, where users are mainly interested in retrieving content stored in the network, rather than in maintaining source-destination communication. Nodes are assumed to be uniformly distributed in the network area. Each node has a limited-capacity content store, which it uses to cache contents according to the proposed caching scheme. Requested content follows a general popularity distribution, and users employ multi- hop communication to retrieve the requested content from the closest cache. We derive the throughput-delay tradeoff of the content-centric wireless network model and solve the caching optimization problem. We then evaluate the network performance for a Zipf content popularity distribution, letting the number of content types and the network size both go to infinity.