Improving efficiency of network resources in elastic optical transport network by using in-network cache functions

We developed a network architecture called information-centric elastic optical transport network (i-CEON) that enables efficient content delivery. Increasing the volume of video traffic consumes network resources, so it is necessary to establish optical transport network architectures suitable for content delivery. For this purpose, we extend existing information-centric networking to be applicable to elastic optical networks. The main focus of this paper is presenting the method in i-CEON of optimizing optical-path routing by effectively using an in-network cache function to efficiently accommodate content traffic. This reduces redundant use of network resources. We formulate the joint optimization problem of elastic optical-path routing and content-replication placement as a mixed integer linear programming problem and also develop a heuristic algorithm. We conducted intensive numerical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and confirmed that it reduced network cost by 21% and server load by 32%.