A hybrid ICN cache coordination scheme
based on role division between cache nodes
Guoqiang Zhang
∗†§
, Xiaohui Wang
†
,QianGao
†¶
and Zhen Liu
‡
∗
State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
†
School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China
‡
Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China
§
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, USA
¶
University of Massachusetts Boston, USA
Corresponding author’s email address:guoqiang@ict.ac.cn
Abstract—Information-Centric Networking(ICN) is a para-
digm shift from traditional TCP/IP’s host-centric approaches,
which relies on self-certifiable content, built-in pervasive in-
network caching and flexible request routing to provide native
support for efficient and scalable content distribution from the
architectural layer. Caching in ICN diverts from traditional Web
Caching due to its arbitrary network topology and the require-
ment for line-rate operation, which makes cache coordination a
crucial task. However, most of the cache coordination schemes
proposed to date use uniform caching coordination policies within
the same cache network, which is either hard to achieve good
balance between user QoE and resource utilization or hard to
scale. This paper proposes a hybrid cache coordination scheme
that bases on cache node role separation. The cache network
is divided into a core area and several edge areas. The core
area applies an explicit and off-path cache coordination policy
such as the HASH-based cache coordination to improve cache
diversity within the cache network, whereas the edge areas can
apply any implicit and on-path cache coordination policies such
as LCE and LCD. The separation allows this scheme to be easily
extended to large networks, and simulation results show that the
hybrid schemes can achieve good balance between user QoE and
network resource utilization.
I. BACKGROUND
Recently, the usage pattern of the Internet has shifted
from sender-driven end-to-end communication to receiver-
driven many-to-one content retrieval. The mismatch between
TCP/IP’s unicast communication primitive and the applica-
tion’s usage model is one of the root causes for today’s
traffic explosion. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a
paradigm shift from the host-centric approaches [1] [2] [3]
[4]. ICN relies on the decoupling between content providers
and consumers, self-certifiable content, pervasive in-network
caching and flexible request routing to satisfy the massive,
asynchronous and heavy-tailed user requests, which provides
native support for efficient and scalable many-to-one content
distribution from the architectural layer. In addition, it is
also believed that ICN is a good candidate to reduce energy
consumption in massive content dissemination [5] [6].
Pervasive in-network caching is regarded as a fundamental
building block of ICN. The pervasiveness makes ICN’s caching
mechanism different from traditional Web caching. Unlike
Web caching, the cache network topology in ICN is no
longer hierarchical, but arbitrary [7]. Meanwhile, as a basic
service, ICN’s caching should support line-speed operation,
which limits the cache capacity of each cache node [8] [19].
Hence, cache coordination between different nodes becomes
very crucial to reduce cache redundancy and improve the utility
of cache resources.
Given a cache network, the primary goals of caching are
mainly two-folded: to improve the user’s quality of experi-
ence(QoE) from users’ perspective, and to improve network
resource utilization and reduce cross-domain traffic from the
network’s perspective [12] [10]. Unfortunately, these two ob-
jectives are sometimes contradictive. In order to improve the
user’s QoE, one tendency is to place as many popular content
as possible to those cache nodes near users. This tendency,
just as the on-path caching policy LCE does [18], will make
many duplicated content copies of popular content, and thus
reducing the cache diversity within the network. On the other
hand, to fulfill the latter goal, one tends to increase the cache
diversity. One extreme of this approach is the HASH-based
cache coordination [9] [11]. This off-path cache coordination
policy leaves at most one copy of each content in the cache
network regardless of the content popularity. This, however,
may degrade the user’s experience. So, a good cache coordi-
nation scheme needs to balance between these two goals.
Besides the tradeoff between QoE and network resource
utilization, there is a growing concern of how to make cache
coordination between different networks [20] and how to make
a cache coordination scheme scalable so that it can be used
in large ISPs. This requires the ability for different cache
networks or different network portions of the same large
network to apply different cache coordination policies rather
than to adopt a universal cache coordination policy. Conse-
quently, a good cache coordination scheme needs to support
the enforcement of flexible or even autonomous policies.
This paper proposes a hybrid cache coordination scheme
based on role division between cache nodes. It divides a
network into one core area and several edge areas. The scheme
can make use of existing partition of large ISPs to establish
the partition, such as OSPF areas. And, for networks without
pre-existing partition, it applies the k -core decomposition to
partition the cache nodes. Cache nodes in the core area applies
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