On Performance of Cache Policy in Information-Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking is (ICN) gaining increasingly concerns, as an important direction of the future Internet architecture research. To study the impacts of various cache policies on overall performance of ICN network, we formulate the in- network caching problem of ICN into Mixed-Integer Linear Programming problem. Furthermore, we infer that frequency-based cache policies like LFU are supposed to perform well by analyzing the properties of optimal cache assignment, which is corroborated by our simulation results. We attempt to explore the impact of the distance between cache and the original content on cache policy performance by posing a novel cache policy named LB (Least Benefit), which takes into account the distance factor besides frequency. Through extensive simulations under various scenarios and configurations, we find that the performance gain brought by LB is limited in comparison to that of LFU, which implies that more sophisticated cache policies involving the distance factor should be considered to improve LFU. Our simulation results also show that, under a reasonable setting of cache size and request pattern, the average hops to get content can be reduced significantly by nearly 50% in comparison to that of the scenario without in- network caching.