A Hybrid ICN Cache Coordination Scheme Based on Role Division between Cache Nodes

Information-Centric Networking(ICN) is a paradigm shift from traditional TCP/IP's host-centric approaches, which relies on self-certifiable content, built-in pervasive in-network caching and flexible request routing to provide native support for efficient and scalable content distribution from the architectural layer. Caching in ICN diverts from traditional Web Caching due to its arbitrary network topology and the requirement for line-rate operation, which makes cache coordination a crucial task. However, most of the cache coordination schemes proposed to date use uniform caching coordination policies within the same cache network, which is either hard to achieve good balance between user QoE and resource utilization or hard to scale. This paper proposes a hybrid cache coordination scheme that bases on cache node role separation. The cache network is divided into a core area and several edge areas. The core area applies an explicit and off- path cache coordination policy such as the HASH-based cache coordination to improve cache diversity within the cache network, whereas the edge areas can apply any implicit and on-path cache coordination policies such as LCE and LCD. The separation allows this scheme to be easily extended to large networks, and simulation results show that the hybrid schemes can achieve good balance between user QoE and network resource utilization.