UC Santa Cruz

A formal framework is presented for the characterization of cache allocation models in Information-Centric Networks (ICN). The framework is used to compare the performance of optimal caching everywhere in an ICN with opportunistic caching of content only near its consumers. This comparison is made using the independent reference model adopted in all prior studies, as well as a new model that captures non-stationary reference locality in space and time. The results obtained analytically and from simulations show that optimal caching throughout an ICN and opportunistic caching at the edge routers of an ICN perform comparably the same. In addition, caching content opportunistically only near its consumers is shown to outperform the traditional on-path caching approach assumed in most ICN architectures in an unstructured network with arbitrary topology represented as a random geometric graph.