A Hybrid Caching Scheme with Dynamic Forwarding Strategy in Information-Centric Network

In this era of huge data traffic, the information-centric network (ICN) is a switching strategy from conventional host-centric communication to a new data-centric one. In-network caching an integral part of ICN can reduce the shortcomings of today's location-based internet paradigm. As ICN has limited caching capability, the decision of optimal routing and content placement are the major challenges. In this study, we suggest a hybrid caching with a dynamic forwarding (HCDF) strategy which takes advantage of the off-path hash routing scheme and on-path caching scheme. To facilitate both caching schemes, a fraction of the caching space is allotted in each cache node for local caching. At the user-end segment, an estimation-based content placement (ECP) policy is designed using content popularity state and cache node position. This policy helps to cache popular content near the consumer's location using the shared cache space. At the server-end segment, the HCDF scheme dynamically selects the most appropriate routing strategy among three strategies (symmetric, asymmetric, and multicast) based on hop count and path stretch. To demonstrate the effectiveness of HCDF, extensive simulation on real-world internet topologies has been carried out. From our investigation, it is observed that the suggested approach exhibits an impressive performance in terms of cache hit, latency, and average link load compared to other standard hash routing and well-known on-path caching schemes. © 2024 The Author(s). IEEJ Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Engineering published by Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC.