Routing and Caching in Information-Centric Networking

Abstract

When the Internet was designed decades ago, main applications are resource sharing such as remote login and file transfer. To support such applications, the key principle in the Internet architecture is point-to-point communications, and the key element is an IP address that identifies a host. Due to the flexible design of the Internet, a wide range of new applications and services have been introduced over the decades. The recent surge of Internet traffic is mainly attributed to applications such as web, P2P file sharing, and video streaming. In such applications, an end user is mostly interested in content itself, not in a particular host or its location. Over the past few years, there have been many efforts to address the above issues from a content centric perspective. Those proposals are collectively called Information Centric Networking (ICN), which is largely deemed as a clean-slate approach. Most of the ICN studies think of content as a key element and hence assume a new paradigm by shifting from host-oriented communications to content-oriented i communications. Consequently, instead of locator-based routing, most ICN proposals consider name-based routing, which decouples content production and consumption in time and space domains. The decoupling enhances content availability and naming persistency, and supports in-network caching, multicast and mobility. Most of ICN proposals use content names as routing entries, and thus the routing scalability is primary concern. ICN allows in-network caching as a built-in functionality. However, if network nodes make caching decisions individually, duplicate copies of the same content may exist among nearby nodes. To address these problems, this dissertation proposes a unified framework named Coordinated Routing and Caching (CoRC) that mitigates routing scalability and enhances the efficiency of the in-network storage.