Decision-making for in-network caching of peer-to-peer content chunks: an analytical modelling study

In-network content caching has recently emerged in the context of Information-Centric Networking (ICN), which allows content objects to be cached at the content router side. In this paper, we specifically focus on in-network caching of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content objects for improving both service and operation efficiencies. We propose an intelligent in-network caching scheme of P2P content chunks, aiming to reduce P2P-based content traffic load and also to achieve improved content distribution performance. Towards this end, the proposed holistic decision-making logic takes into account context information on the P2P characteristics such as chunk availability. In addition, we also analyse the benefit of coordination between neighbouring content routers when making caching decisions in order to avoid duplicated P2P chunk caching nearby. An analytical modelling framework is developed to quantitatively evaluate the efficiency of the proposed in-network caching scheme