Proactive Caching Placement for Arbitrary Topology With Multi-Hop Forwarding in ICN

With the rapid growth of network traffic and the enhancement of the quality of experiences of users, Information-Centric Networking (ICN), which is a content-centric network architecture with named data caching and routing, is proposed to improve the multimedia content distribution efficiency. In arbitrary topology, cache nodes and users are randomly distributed and connected, hence it is challenging to achieve an optimal caching placement under this situation. In this paper, we propose a caching placement algorithm for arbitrary topology in ICN. We formulate an optimization problem of proactive caching placement for arbitrary topology combined with multi-hop forwarding, with an objective to optimize the user delay and the load balancing level of the nodes simultaneously. Since the original problem is NP-hard, we solve the formulated caching placement problem in two sub-problems, content replica allocation sub-problem and content replica placement sub-problem. First, in the content replica allocation sub-problem, the replica number of each content is obtained by utilizing the auction theory. Second, the replica number of each content is used as a constraint for the content replica placement sub-problem, which is solved by matching theory. The caching placement algorithm combined with multi-hop NRR forwarding maximizes the utilization of cache resources in order to achieve better caching performance. The numerical results show that significant hop count savings and load balancing level improvement are attainable via the proposed algorithm.