CRCache: Exploiting the correlation between content popularity and network topology information for ICN caching

Information-centric networking (ICN) is designed to decouple contents from hosts at the network layer, using in-network caching as a key feature to improve the overall performance. However, the en-route caching strategy used in many ICN implementations generally yields redundancies in the cached contents across different routers. There are also some recent works focusing on cache optimization by respectively exploiting either application layer or network layer, which we think is not sufficient to increase cache hit rate and reduce traffic. In this paper, we propose a novel caching scheme (CRCache) that utilizes a cross-layer design to cache contents in a few selected routers based on the correlation of content popularity and the network topology. Specifically, through exploiting information available at both application and network layers, CRCache aims to improve the cache hit rate and reduce the overall network traffic. We conduct a large scale and real traces-driven simulation with an underlying real Internet topology in China, and show that by using CRCache, the overall cache hit rate is increased by 62.5% and network traffic reduction is improved by at least 42% compared with recent single layer schemes.