Caching in Information-Centric Networking: Strategies, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an appealing architecture that has received a remarkable interest from the research community thanks to its friendly structure. Several projects have proposed innovative ICN models to cope with the Internet practice, which moves from host-centrism to receiverdriven communication. A worth mentioning component of these novel models is in-network caching, which provides flexibility and pervasiveness for the upturn of swiftness in data distribution. Because of the rapid Internet traffic growth, cache deployment and content caching have been unanimously accepted as conspicuous ICN issues to be resolved. In this article, a survey of cache management strategies in ICN is presented along with their contributions and limitations, and their performance is evaluated in a simulation network environment with respect to cache hit, stretch ratio, and eviction operations. Some unresolved ICN caching challenges and directions for future research in this networking area are also discussed.