How to cache in ICN-based IoT environments?

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an emerging network paradigm based on name-identified data objects and in-network caching. Therefore, ICN contents are distributed in a scalable and cost-efficient manner. With the rapid growth of IoT traffic, ICN is intended to be a suitable architecture to support IoT networks. In fact, ICN provides unique persistent naming, in-network caching and multicast communications which reduce the data producer load and the response latency. Using ICN in an IoT environment requires a study of caching policies in terms of cache placement strategies and cache replacement policies. To this end, we address, in this paper, caching challenges with the aim to identify which caching policies are suitable for IoT networks. Simulation findings show that the combination of the consumer-cache caching strategy and the RR cache replacement policy is the most convenient in IoT environments in terms of hop reduction ratio, server hit reduction and response latency.