A Fog caching scheme enabled by ICN for IoT environments

The rapid growth in computation and processing power of end-user devices has transitioned network functionalities from the core network to the Fog, thus, reducing response times and ultimately improving user experience. The Information-Centric Networking paradigm aims to transform conventional content caching and delivery approaches by enabling Fog nodes to participate in both forwarding and caching. In this work, a Fog caching design scheme is presented for applications such as Internet-ofThings, which integrates three novel design attributes. Firstly, a Fog cluster-based scheme is proposed that utilises both in-network and end-user devices to cache content closer to the edge network, according to the increasing popularity of the content. Secondly, this work proposes a near-path approach that leverages caching nodes near the content delivery path. Finally, by craftily integrating reactive and proactive caching, congestion during network peak-time is averted. Simulations are conducted in the Icarus environment and evaluated against eight popular benchmark techniques. The results indicate significant improvement in internal link load and path stretch metrics. Finally, the cache hit ratio metric is consistently better than all other benchmarks, while the latency performance of the proposed scheme is competitive when the content distribution is more concentrated. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.