Performance evaluation of content based routing with in-network caching

In order to meet the overwhelming demands of content retrieval for mobile end users, the community effort has been made on designing next-generation Internet from a clean slate. In this paper, we present the design and performance evaluation of Integrated Caching, in which we assume each router on the Internet can cache contents that pass by and reply to content requests with its local copy. This assumption is made valid by the fact that storage is rapidly becoming both available and affordable. With this assumption, we advocate a content retrieval enhancement technique: Content Broadcast, which lets each router advertise its cached contents to the immediate neighbors so that a router can direct subsequent content requests to nearby caching nodes. Each router builds its own content based routing table. Through detailed simulations, we show that the technique can lead to significant performance improvements compared to baseline integrated caching schemes. More importantly, this performance gain can be achieved with a minimal communication overhead by limiting content broadcast only within one hop. Also, we demonstrate that the storage requirement of the discussed scheme is moderate.