CCJRF-ICN: A Novel Mechanism for Coadjuvant Caching Joint Request Forwarding in Information Centric Networks

Information centric networking (ICN) shifts the focus of existing internet architecture from host-oriented to content-oriented model by enabling in-network caching and content-based forwarding. These ICN features help to increase network performance by decreasing content discovery delay, content server load, and network congestion. To route a content interest inside network such that content can be fetched with minimal time is a challenging task in ICN. The performance of the ICN routing protocol can be significantly improved if the decisions related to content chunk placement and request forwarding are taken in a cooperative fashion. This paper describes a novel strategy for co-operative caching joint request forwarding in ICN, focusing on decreasing content retrieval latency. To do so, the caching strategy leverages the concept of connected dominating set (CDS) for creating a virtual backbone network to eliminate caching redundancy and reduce content discovery delay. It considers content chunk placement and request forwarding tasks as strongly co-related procedures. It exploits the caching information so that the request is forwarded to a content router (CR) with the maximum likelihood of carrying needed data using the betweenness centrality (BC) of CR. The proposed approach also uses the Markov chain-based model to estimate CS hit likelihood and use it as decisional parameter while forwarding the interest packet. This mechanism helps to fetch the content within the shortest possible time duration. The CCJRF-ICN adopts the Dijkstra’s shortest path routing and works in collaboration with the CDS-driven caching joint forwarding mechanism. The simulation study of CCJRF-ICN is done inside ns-3 based ndnSIM-2.0 simulator with performance measures like content store (CS) hit ratio, content discovery delay, mean hop distance, network load, and network overhead. The simulation outcomes demonstrate that CCJRF-ICN outperforms the state-of-the-art strategies for realistic topologies (GEANT, US-26, Euro-28) and shows improvement up to 5-35% against stated performance measures.