Minimizing delay in content-centric networks using heuristics-based in-network caching

Content-centric networking (CCN) has emerged as a promising future Internet architecture that brings effective content retrieval mechanism. In CCN, the contents are accessed using their names instead of searching for the host location in the network. To improve Quality-of-Service for the users, CCN offers the in-network caching capability that places the incoming contents in the intermediate on-path nodes. During content retrieval, the in-network caching reduces network delay and bandwidth requirements as the requester access the content from the nearest node having a copy of the required content. Therefore, it is crucial to control the content caching decisions in the CCN as the efficiency of the caching scheme largely affects the performance of the network. In this context, a novel content placement scheme is proposed that considers node degree centrality and content provider distance based on the network bandwidth parameters for effective content placement decisions. A heuristic approach has been proposed that investigates the compound effect of these parameters to minimize average delay and network traffic during retrieval of the requested content. The proposed caching scheme has been implemented on the Abilene network topology and evaluated for different content access patterns and caching capacities. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme on the existing peer schemes for various performance parameters such as average network hop-count, delay, and network traffic load.