Energy-aware Probabilistic Forwarding in Wireless Content-Centric Networks

Content centric network is a kind of promising architecture of future internet. When implementing the CCN architecture in the energy-constraint wireless scenarios, there is a great challenge that is not considered in the original design of CCN, that is, the energy saving problem. In this paper, we propose a lightweight energy-aware probabilistic forwarding strategy. Unlike the existing approaches that require the modification of routing or singling in control plane, our solution aims to solve the problem within data plane. We propose to consider the MAC address in broadcasting Interest packets, and unicast back the Data packets to incoming interface. What's more, an extendable function is proposed to describe the probability of forwarding Interest packet, which considers both the node remainder energy and its relative role importance in the network topology. The simulation results show that, compared with the default policy of always forwarding, our proposed strategy enables the nodes to control their energy consumption differently, and thus prolongs the network lifetime significantly.