On the performance of bandwidth and storage sharing in information-centric networks

Information Centric Network (ICN) proposals, have recently emerged to define new network architectures where content, and not its location, becomes the core of the communication model. Such new paradigms push data storage and delivery at network layer and are designed to cope with current Internet usage, mainly centered around content dissemination and retrieval. In this paper, we develop an analytical model of ICN storage and bandwidth sharing under fairly general assumptions on total demand, topology, content popularity and limited network resources. Our study applies to a class of Content oriented networks identified by receiver-driven packet-based communication with in-network storage. We derive a closed-form expression for expected stationary delivery time as a function of hit/miss probabilities at network caches, content popularity and cache sizes. Our analytical results, supported by packet level simulations, can be used to analyze fundamental trade-offs of ICN architectures. They also provide an essential building block for the design and evaluation of ICN protocols. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.