MAGIC: A distributed MAx-Gain In-network Caching strategy in information-centric networks

Information centric networks (ICNs) allow content objects to be cached within the network, so as to provide efficient data delivery. Existing works on in-network caches mainly focus on minimizing the redundancy of caches to improve the cache hit ratio, which may not lead to significant bandwidth saving. On the other hand, it could result in too frequent caching operations, i.e., cache placement and replacement, causing more power consumption at nodes, which shall be avoided in energy-limited data delivery environments, e.g., wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a distributed caching strategy along the data delivery path, called MAGIC (MAx-Gain In-network Caching). MAGIC aims to reduce bandwidth consumption by jointly considering the content popularity and hop reduction. We also take the cache replacement penalty into account when making cache placement decisions to reduce the number of caching operations. We compare our caching strategy with several state-of-art caching strategies in ICNs. Our results show that the MAGIC strategy can reduce up to 34.50% bandwidth consumption, save up to 17.91% server hit ratio, and reduce up to 38.84% caching operations compared with the existing best caching strategy when cache size is small, which is a significant improvement in wireless networks with limited cache size at each wireless node.