On the interplay among naming, content validity and caching in Information Centric Networks

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is paradigm in which the network layer provides users with content addressed “by name”. In-network caching is one of the key functionality to be provided by ICN nodes. To avoid network nodes caching fake contents, it is necessary to verify the validity of data items. A content is deemed to be valid if it verifies three properties: i) integrity: it has not be modified; ii) provenance: it comes from the intended source; iii) relevance: it is indeed the content requested from the user (by using the name of that content). In this paper, we discuss the interplay among three pivotal ICN aspects: caching, validity and naming. Specifically, we will investigate different naming and digital signature schemes, evaluating their speed, overhead and their impact on caching performance. Perhaps counter-intuitively, we find that the relatively slow verification time of today´s signatures, which bottlenecks the rate of storing new data items in the network caches, does not come as a critical shortcoming, but may actually even improve the cache hit probability when the LRU caching policy is employed.