Adaptive NDN caching: Leveraging dynamic behaviour for enhanced efficiency

Abstract

The TCP/IP architecture has been the backbone of the Internet for decades, but its host-centric design is becoming less suitable for the data-centric communication demands of today. As the demand for efficient content distribution and retrieval grows, Named Data Networking (NDN) emerges as a promising alternative. NDN shifts the focus from host-centric to data-centric networking, with packets routed based on content names rather than IP addresses. A key feature of NDN is in-network caching, which attempts to reduce latency, alleviate network congestion and enhance content availability. However, the known NDN caching schemes do not consider the dynamic content demand that changes with respect to time and location. This causes the end users to encounter relatively higher content access latency. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel dynamic behaviour strategy that can be integrated into the known NDN caching schemes. This strategy can enable the NDN routers to make cooperative decisions and move the content copy to an edge router that requests the content most frequently. We comprehensively evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art NDN caching schemes with and without our proposed dynamic strategy using several real-world topologies. Our experimental results show that incorporating dynamic behaviour into these schemes leads to significantly better outcomes in terms of CHR, content latency, and path stretch. Specifically, the best improvements include a threefold increase in CHR, an 80% reduction in content access latency, and nearly a 45% decrease in path stretch. As an aside, we also develop a framework for the Icarus simulator to automate the process of performance assessment of different NDN caching schemes on a large number of real-world topologies.