On the Cache-and-Forward Network Architecture

In order to meet the increasing demands of content dissemination in Internet, we propose a novel architecture for the future Internet called cache-and-forward (CNF), which transports content as "packages" in a hop-by-hop manner towards the destination, instead of transporting a stream of fragmented packets along an established TCP/IP connection. In this paper, we discuss how the CNF network architecture can be designed for efficient content retrieval. We first introduce several specific services provided in CNF network which are centered around content handling and mobile access. We then give an overview of the CNF protocol stack, which is built on top of IP, and consists of a data plane and a control plane. We provide detailed descriptions of each protocol within both planes. Then we present two caching algorithms, where one involves each CNF router making independent decisions on content caching while the other coordinates node caching within an autonomous system (AS) through hashing. Finally, we gave the initial simulation results to show the performance benefits of hop-by-hop transport and content caching.