Exploring content popularity in Information-Centric networks

Information-Centric Networking (ICN), an alternative architecture to the current Internet infrastructure, focuses on the distribution and retrieval of content by employing caches in a network to reduce network traffic. The employment of caches may be accomplished using graph-based and content-based criteria such as the position of a node in a network and content popularity. The contribution of this paper lies on the characterization of content popularity for on-path in-network caching. To this end, four dynamic approaches for identifying content popularity are evaluated via simulations. Content popularity may be determined per chunk or per object, calculated by the number of requests for a content against the sum of requests or the maximum number of requests. Based on the results, chunk-based approaches provide 23% more accurate content popularity calculations than object-based approaches. In addition, approaches that are based on the comparison of a content against the maximum number of requests have been shown to be more accurate than the alternatives.