Application of index coding in information-centric networks

The index coding problem relates to transmission policies when the source node broadcasts encoded data to users with side information. This paper extends the index coding problem to cases when the source node can reach users through multihop communications. The new approach is called Modified Index Coding (MIC) which can be applied to both wireless and wired networks. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach by applying MIC to Information-Centric Networks (ICN). We demonstrate that the combination of ICN and MIC requires a hybrid caching scheme that includes both central and distributed caching to support two different goals. The approach results in a combination of conventional caching in ICN and a new distributed caching scheme across nodes in the network. Our analysis demonstrates that capacity improvement can be achieved by the new architecture. Simulation results compare the capacity improvement to traditional ICN architecture.