Content, Topology and Cooperation in In-network Caching

In-network caching aims at improving content delivery and alleviating pres-sures on network bandwidth by leveraging universally networked caches. This thesis studies the design of cooperative in-network caching strategy from three perspectives: content, topology and cooperation, specifically fo-cuses on the mechanisms of content delivery and cooperation policy and their impacts on the performance of cache networks. The main contributions of this thesis are twofold. From measurement per-spective, we show that the conventional metric hit rate is not sufficient in evaluating a caching strategy on non-trivial topologies, therefore we intro-duce footprint reduction and coupling factor, which contain richer informa-tion. We show cooperation policy is the key in balancing various tradeoffs in caching strategy design, and further investigate the performance impact from content per se via different chunking schemes