Cost-Aware Optimisation of Cache Allocation for Information-Centric Networking

Abstract

Information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging paradigm that decouples content from the host to achieve fast and cost-efficient communication and content distribution in the future Internet. A key feature of ICN is the deployment of ubiquitous in-network caching to speed up service delivery and improve network resource utilisation. ICN caching has been widely studied in terms of caching strategies and caching performance. However, the economic aspect of ICN has received marginal consideration so far, although it is vital to understand the potential cost-efficiency of ICN before its wide deployment in service provider network. To address this issue, we propose a cost-aware caching scheme to study the Quality-of-Service (QoS) and cost of ICN and investigate the inner association between them. Two new models are designed to characterise the cost and QoS of ICN with arbitrary topology under heterogeneous bursty content requests. A multi-objective evolution algorithm is adopted to find the optimal cache resource allocation. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in achieving cost-efficiency and QoS guarantee in ICN caching.