CCEP: an efficacious content caching and eviction priorities for high performance of in-network caching in information centric networking

Nowadays, Internet usage is shifting towards information distribution and retrieval, with data access becoming the norm. As a result, information-centric networking (ICN) infrastructure has emerged for the future Internet. ICN includes an in-network caching feature that allows contents to be cached in the network to provide efficient data delivery, thus increasing interest in providing the best caching strategy to manage contents over the ICN network. The default caching strategy adopted by ICN is Leave Copy Everywhere (LCE), where the content of the network is cached at all content routers along the downloading path. Thus, some problems appear such as the increase in caching redundancy and the low hit ratio of the cache, besides many cache operations (placement and replacement operations), which cause an increase in energy consumption. Since then, in-network caching has been one of the hot topics of ICN research to play a significant role in improving the network. Various caching strategies have been proposed to solve the drawbacks of LCE and enhance the performance of in-network caching in ICN. Nevertheless, these proposed caching strategies also still suffer from some disadvantages that render them inefficient for performance improvement. Therefore, this thesis proposes a new caching strategy named “An Efficacious Content Caching and Eviction Priorities for High Performance of In-Network Caching” (CCEP). It combines the advantages and overcomes the drawbacks of the existing caching strategies to provide distinguished performance in terms of hop reduction ratio, cache hit ratio, and cache operations. The CCEP strategy is based on caching priority and eviction priority for the content. Synchronously, the caching strategy calculates caching priority for content in each content router across the path between the user and the content source (server). Then, the content router with maximum caching priority will cache the content. When the cache is full and new content arrives to cache at the content router (content replacement), the caching strategy calculates eviction priority for all cached contents, and the content with maximum eviction priority will be evicted to cache the new content. The performance of CCEP was evaluated through simulations, and the results show that the proposed caching strategy achieves significant performance gains compared to the existing caching strategies. In more detail, CCEP was compared to the default caching strategy; CCEP can reduce the number of cache operations to 99.99%, and increase hop reduction to 1667.44%, and cache hit ratio to 1815.63%. It was compared to the best-caching strategy (MAGIC), and CCEP can reduce the number of cache operations to 21.65%, and increase hop reduction to 53.26%, and cache hit ratio to 17.43%.