Performance Estimation and Evaluation Framework for Caching Policies in Hierarchical Caches

The emergence of information-centric network (ICN) architectures has attracted a flurry of renewed research interest in caching policies and their performance analysis. One important feature ICNs offer that is distinct from classical computer caches is a distributed network of caches, namely, a cache network which poses additional challenges both in terms of practical cache management issues and performance analysis. Much attention of the research community has focused on performance analysis of cache networks under various caching policies. However, the issue of how to evaluate and compare caching policies for cache networks has not been adequately addressed. In this paper, we propose a novel and general framework for evaluating caching policies in a hierarchical network of caches. We introduce the notion of a hit probability/rate matrix, and employ a generalized notion of majorization as the basic tool for evaluating caching policies for various performance metrics. We discuss how the framework can be applied to existing caching policies, and conduct an extensive simulation-based evaluation to demonstrate the utility and accuracy of our framework.