OpenCache: A lightweight regional cache collaboration approach in hierarchical-named ICN

Information-centric networking (ICN) names contents instead of end-nodes and enables in-network caching to reuse those named packets, thus improving the efficiency of content delivery. On-path caching is an inherent feature in ICN, which caches contents along the path from providers to consumers, while off-path caching is not directly supported and its maintenance normally requires non-trivial overhead. In this paper, we propose a lightweight regional cache collaboration approach, called OpenCache, to sharing popular cached data among small-range caches with least cache information exchanges, especially for hierarchical-named ICN. Different from other available solutions, OpenCache enables collaborators to exchange aggregated hierarchical names (i.e., prefixes), instead of data structures summarized from separated and specific data names, to fundamentally reduce the collaborating cost of communication and maintenance. In addition, our approach exploits forwarding information base (FIB) to selectively relay Interest packets to nearby collaborative routers for low-cost data retrieval. Theoretical analyses and extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate our scheme and the results show that OpenCache can reduce packet latency in retrieving data by about 38% compared to original ICN while its additional collaborating overhead is only around 15% of other schemes. Our approach explores the feasibility of lightweight collaboration with aggregation of hierarchical names.