Advertising cached contents in the control plane: Necessity and feasibility

A key feature of Information-Centric Networking architectures is universal caching where anyone can cache any content and users can obtain the content from anywhere as long as the content itself is intact. This powerful feature benefits the content providers, the Internet service providers (ISPs) as well as end users since the requested content can be fetched from the nearest cache who is able to satisfy the request. Hence, server load, redundant network traffic and fetch latency are all reduced. However, given the huge number of contents in the Internet and the rapid replacement of cached contents, designing a scalable routing protocol to reach the full potential of universal caching is very challenging. Previous proposal in [1] tackles the problem by only considering contents on original servers in the control plane and opportunistically exploring cached contents in the data plane via so-called forwarding strategy. In this paper we argue that, to unleash the full potential of Information-Centric Networking, cached contents should be taken into consideration in the control plane and propose a specific scheme to achieve that. We believe addressing cached contents in the control plane (even imperfectly) is more efficient than “guessing” them in the data plane.