Performance evaluation of information-centric networking for multimedia services

Abstract

The rapid development in multimedia services has shifted the major function of the current Internet from host-centric communication to service-oriented content dissemination. Motivated by this significant change, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has emerged as a new networking paradigm, which aims at providing natural support for efficient information retrieval over the Internet. As a crucial characteristic of ICN, in-network caching enables users to efficiently access popular content from ubiquitous caches to improve the Quality-of-Experience (QoE). Therefore, in-network caching for ICN has received considerable attention in recent years and many cache schemes and models have been proposed. However, there is a lack of research into ICN cache models under practical environments such as arbitrary topology and multimedia services exhibiting bursty nature. To bridge the gap, this paper proposes a new analytical model to gain valuable insight into the caching performance of ICN with arbitrary topology and bursty content requests. The accuracy of the proposed model is validated by comparing the analytical results with those obtained from simulation experiments. The analytical model is then used as a cost-efficient tool to investigate the impact of key network and content parameters on the performance of caching in ICN.