ProxaDyn: A Proximity-Aware Dynamic Caching Approach for Named Data Networks

Named Data Network (NDN), a future Internet architecture is introduced to address the shortcomings of the current Internet architecture. NDN supports in-network caching to facilitate scalable content distribution and enhance overall network performance. However, the known NDN caching strategies suffer from a few common drawbacks, such as inefficient cache utilization, high content redundancy, and overhead due to lookup repetition. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel caching strategy called ProxaDyn for efficient content lookup, placement, and replacement. During the content lookup phase, ProxaDyn interacts exclusively with the router responsible for caching a particular content. This eliminates interaction with other intermediate routers, thereby significantly reducing content access latency. For content placement, ProxaDyn strategically selects an on-path router based on content popularity. Popular content is placed in the cache of a router closer to the consumer, while less popular content is cached in a router away from the consumer. This approach significantly improves the cache hits and reduces the access latency. We test ProxaDyn over a diverse range of real-world network topologies. Using extensive experiments, we show that ProxaDyn could achieve significantly better results compared to the state-of-the-art NDN caching strategies.