How Much to Coordinate? — Optimizing In-Network Caching in Content-Centric Networks

Abstract—In content-centric networks, it is challenging how to optimally provision in-network storage to cache contents, so as to balance the trade-offs between the network performance and the provisioning cost. To address this problem, we first propose a holistic model for intra-domain networks to characterize the network performance of routing contents to clients and the network cost incurred by globally coordinating the in-network storage capability. We then derive the optimal strategy for provi-sioning the storage capability that optimizes the overall network performance and cost, and analyze the performance gains via numerical evaluations on real network topologies. Our results reveal interesting phenomena; for instance, different ranges of the Zipf exponent can lead to opposite optimal strategies, and the trade-offs between the network performance and the provisioning cost have great impacts on the stability of the optimal strategy. We also demonstrate that the optimal strategy can achieve significant gain on both the load reduction at origin servers and the improvement on the routing performance. Moreover, given an optimal coordination level `∗, we design a routing aware content placement (RACP) algorithm that runs on a centralized server. The algorithm computes and assigns contents to each CCN router to store, which can minimize the overall routing cost, e.g., transmission delay or hop counts, to deliver contents to clients. By conducting extensive simulations using a large scale trace dataset collected from a commercial 3G network in China, our results demonstrate that our caching scheme can achieve 4% to 22 % latency reduction on average over the state-of-the-art caching mechanisms. Index Terms—in-network caching, content-centric networks, coordinated caching I