Heartbeat: Effective Access to Off-Path Cached Content in NDN

Abstract

In Information-centric networking(ICN), content is distributed across network caches and accessed using content names instead of location identifiers. This characteristic effectively reduces network costs and latency, but the benefits vary greatly depending on how effectively user requests reach the target content in the cache. Existing literature suggests two approaches for accessing cached content: utilizing replicated requests and exchanging cache catalogs periodically. However, replicated requests can result in redundant data transfer, leading to bandwidth waste. The volatile nature of cached content can render the exchanged cache catalogs outdated, leading to access failure. Moreover, the cache catalog itself can consume a significant amount of bandwidth. To address these issues and implement efficient content access in ICN, we design a novel scheme called Heartbeat. Heartbeat disseminates information solely about newly inserted or relocated content with the lifetime carefully calculated, which enables sufficient utilization of cached content while preventing access failures caused by outdated information. We further minimize the overhead of Heartbeat significantly using several enhancement strategies. Simulation studies conducted on ndnSIM demonstrate that employing Heartbeat enables 45% more requests to be serviced from network caches, while reducing service latency and bandwidth consumption by up to 11% and 47% respectively, compared to comparative schemes.