Information-centric networking (ICN) provides low-latency content delivery with in-network caching, but delivery latency depends on cache distance from consumers. To reduce delivery latency, a scheme to cluster domains and retain the main popular content in each cluster with a cache distribution range has been proposed, which enables consumers to retrieve content from neighboring clusters/caches. However, when the distribution of content popularity changes, all content caches may not be distributed adequately in a cluster, so consumers cannot retrieve them from nearby caches. We therefore propose a dynamic clustering scheme to adjust the cache distribution range in accordance with the change in content popularity and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through simulation.

Due to the increase in the volume of data and intensified concurrent requests, distributed caching is commonly used to manage high-concurrency requests and alleviate pressure on databases. However, there is limited research on distributed record mapping caching, and traditional caching algorithms have suboptimal resolution performance for mapping records that typically follow a long-tail distribution. To address the aforementioned issue, in this paper, we propose a recommendation-based adaptive auxiliary caching method, AC-REC, which delivers the primary cache record along with a list of additional cache records. The method uses request correlations as a basis for recommendations, customizes the number of additional cache entries provided, and dynamically adjusts the time-to-live. We conducted evaluations to compare the performance of our method against various benchmark strategies. The results show that our proposed method, as compared to the conventional LCE method, increased the cache hit ratio by an average of 20%, Moreover, this improvement is achieved while effectively utilizing the cache space. We believe that our strategy will contribute an effective solution to the related studies in both traditional network architecture and caching in paradigms like ICN.

In this study, we propose a mechanism called adaptive failsoft control to address peak traffic in mobile live streaming, using a chasing playback function. Although a cache system is avaliable to support the chasing playback function for live streaming in a base station and device-to-device communication, the request concentration by highlight scenes influences the traffic load owing to data unavailability. To avoid data unavailability, we adapted two live streaming features: (1) streaming data while switching the video quality, and (2) time variability of the number of requests. The second feature enables a fallback mechanism for the cache system by prioritizing cache eviction and terminating the transfer of cache-missed requests. This paper discusses the simulation results of the proposed mechanism, which adopts a request model appropriate for (a) avoiding peak traffic and (b) maintaining continuity of service.

In cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) architecture, the Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) protocol imposes a strict limit on the latency between the baseband unit (BBU) pool and the remote radio head (RRH), which is a key challenge in the adoption of C-RANs. In this letter, we propose a joint edge caching and network coding strategy (ENC) in the C-RANs with multicast fronthaul to improve the performance of HARQ and thus achieve ultra-low latency in 5G cellular systems. We formulate the edge caching design as an optimization problem for maximizing caching utility so as to obtain the optimal caching time. Then, for real-time data flows with different latency constraints, we propose a scheduling policy based on network coding group (NCG) to maximize coding opportunities and thus improve the overall latency performance of multicast fronthaul transmission. We evaluate the performance of ENC by conducting simulation experiments based on NS-3. Numerical results show that ENC can efficiently reduce the delivery delay.

The network load is increasing due to the spread of content distribution services. Caching is recognized as a technique to reduce the peak network load by storing popular content into memories of users. Coded caching is a new caching approach based on a carefully designed content placement to create coded multicasting opportunities. Coded caching schemes in single-rate networks are evaluated by the tradeoff between the size of memory and that of delivered data. For considering the network with multiple transmission rates, it is crucial how to operate multicast. In multicast delivery, a sender must communicate to intended receivers at a rate that is available to all receivers. Multicast scheduling method of determining rates to deliver are evaluated by throughput and delay in multi-rate wireless networks. In this paper, we discuss coded caching in the multi-rate wireless networks. We newly define a measure for evaluating the coded caching scheme as coded caching delay and propose a new coded caching scheme. Also, we compare the proposed coded caching scheme with conventional coded caching schemes and show that the proposed scheme is suitable for multi-rate wireless networks.

The static deployment of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) introduces 1) significant degradation of Quality of Service (QoS), 2) inefficiency in the network and computing resource utilization, and 3) Network Function Virtualization (NFV)-based services with insufficient scalability, optimality, and flexibility. Caching VNFs is a promising solution to satisfy the dynamic demand to deploy a variety of VNFs and to maximize the performance as well as cost effectiveness. Although the concept of Content Delivery Network (CDN) is popular for efficiently caching and distributing contents, VNF deployment does not realize the benefit of CDN-based caching approaches. The challenges to caching VNFs are 1) to cover the large variety of VNFs and their properties, including the necessity of service chaining, and 2) to achieve high acceptance ratio given the limited availability of resources. This paper proposes Function Delivery Network (FDN), which is a cluster of distributed edge hypervisors for caching VNFs over a Software-Defined Network (SDN). The deployment and quality of the network function can be significantly improved by serving them closer to the end-users from the cached VNFs. FDN introduces a new strategy called Value-based caching that considers 1) the locality of reference and performance parameters of network and edge hypervisors together and 2) a partial deployment of service chains across multiple edge hypervisors for further efficient utilization of hypervisors resources. Evaluations on different patterns of input requests confirm that Value-based caching introduces significant improvement on both QoS and resource utilization in NFV.

In previous studies, we determined that workloads often contain many input-output (IO) concentrations. Such concentrations are aggregations of IO accesses. They appear in narrow regions of a storage volume and continue for durations of up to about an hour. These narrow regions occupy a small percentage of the logical unit number capacity, include most IO accesses, and appear at unpredictable logical block addresses. We investigated these workloads by focusing on page-level regularity and found that they often include few regularities. This means that simple caching may not reduce the response time for these workloads sufficiently because the cache migration algorithm uses page-level regularity. We previously developed an on-the-fly automated storage tiering (OTF-AST) system consisting of an SSD and an HDD. The migration algorithm identifies IO concentrations with moderately long durations and migrates them from the HDD to the SSD. This means that there is little or no reduction in the response time when the workload includes few such concentrations. We have now developed a hybrid storage system consisting of a cache drive with an SSD and HDD and a multi-tier SSD that uses OTF-AST, called “OTF-AST with caching.” The OTF-AST scheme handles the IO accesses that produce moderately long duration IO concentrations while the caching scheme handles the remaining IO accesses. Experiments showed that the average response time for our system was 45% that of Facebook FlashCache on a Microsoft Research Cambridge workload.

Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) is currently standardized as a leading technology for the implementation of Vehicular Networks. Non-safety application in DSRC is emerging beyond the initial safety application. However, it suffers from a typical issue of low data delivery ratio in urban environments, where static and moving obstacles block or attenuate the radio propagation, as well as other technical issues such as temporal-spatial restriction, capital cost for infrastructure deployments and limited radio coverage range. On the other hand, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) advocates ubiquitous in-network caching to enhance content distribution. The major characteristics of CCN are compatible with the requirements of vehicular networks so that CCN could be available by vehicular networks. In this paper, we propose a CCN-based vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication scheme on the top of DSRC standard for content dissemination, while demonstrate its feasibility by analyzing the frame format of Beacon and WAVE service advertisement (WSA) messages of DSRC specifications. The simulation-based validations derived from our software platform with OMNeT++, Veins and SUMO in realistic traffic environments are supplied to evaluate the proposed scheme. We expect our research could provide references for future more substantial revision of DSRC standardization for CCN-based V2V communication.

In content oriented networks (CON), routers in a network are generally equipped with local cache storages and store incoming contents temporarily. Efficient utilization of total cache storage in networks is one of the most important technical issues in CON, as it can reduce content server load, content download latency and network traffic. Performance of networked cache is reported to strongly depend on both cache decision and content request routing. In this paper, we evaluate several combinations of these two strategies. Especially for routing, we take up off-path cache routing, Breadcrumbs, as one of the content request routing proposals. Our performance evaluation results show that off-path cache routing, Breadcrumbs, suffers low performance with cache decisions which generally has high performance with shortest path routing (SPR), and obtains excellent performance with TERC (Transparent En-Route Cache) which is well-known to have low performance with widely used SPR. Our detailed evaluation results in two network environments, emerging CONs and conventional IP, show these insights hold in both of these two network environments.

The network load is increasing due to the spread of content distribution services. Caching is known as a technique to reduce a peak network load by prefetching popular contents into memories of users. Coded caching is a new caching approach based on a carefully designed content placement in order to create coded multicasting opportunities. Recent works have discussed single-layer caching systems, but many networks consist of multiple layers of cache. In this paper, we discuss a coded caching problem for a hierarchical network that has a different number of layers of cache. The network has users who connect to an origin server via a mirror server and users who directly connect to the origin server. We provide lower bounds of the rates for this problem setting based on the cut-set bound. In addition, we propose three basic coded caching schemes and characterize these schemes. Also, we propose a new coded caching scheme by combining two basic schemes and provide achievable rates of the combination coded caching scheme. Finally, we show that the proposed combination scheme demonstrates a good performance by a numerical result.

Information-centric networking (ICN) has gained attention from network research communities due to its capability of efficient content dissemination. In-network caching function in ICN plays an important role to achieve the design motivation. However, many researchers on in-network caching due to its ability to efficiently disseminate content. The in-network caching function in ICN plays an important role in realizing the design goals. However, many in-network caching researchers have focused on where to cache rather than how to cache: the former is known as content deployment in the network and the latter is known as cache replacement in an ICN router. Although the cache replacement has been intensively researched in the context of web-caching and content delivery network previously, networks, the conventional approaches cannot be directly applied to ICN due to the fine granularity of chunks in ICN, which eventually changes the access patterns. In this paper, we argue that ICN requires a novel cache replacement algorithm to fulfill the requirements in the design of a high performance ICN router. Then, we propose a novel cache replacement algorithm to satisfy the requirements named Compact CLOCK with Adaptive Replacement (Compact CAR), which can reduce the consumption of cache memory to one-tenth compared to conventional approaches. In this paper, we argue that ICN requires a novel cache replacement algorithm to fulfill the requirements set for high performance ICN routers. Our solution, Compact CLOCK with Adaptive Replacement (Compact CAR), is a novel cache replacement algorithm that satisfies the requirements. The evaluation result shows that the consumption of cache memory required to achieve a desired performance can be reduced by 90% compared to conventional approaches such as FIFO and CLOCK.

Information-centric networking (ICN) has received increasing attention from all over the world. The novel aspects of ICN (e.g., the combination of caching, multicasting, and aggregating requests) is based on names that act as addresses for content. The communication with name has the potential to cope with the growing and complicating Internet technology, for example, Internet of Things, cloud computing, and a smart society. To realize ICN, router hardware must implement an innovative cache replacement algorithm that offers performance far superior to a simple policy-based algorithm while still operating with feasible computational and memory overhead. However, most previous studies on cache replacement policies in ICN have proposed policies that are too blunt to achieve significant performance improvement, such as first-in first-out (popularly, FIFO) and random policies, or impractical policies in a resource-restricted environment, such as least recently used (LRU). Thus, we propose CLOCK-Pro Using Switching Hash-tables (CUSH) as the suitable policy for network caching. CUSH can identify and keep popular content worth caching in a network environment. CUSH also employs CLOCK and hash-tables, which are low-overhead data structure, to satisfy the cost requirement. We numerically evaluate our proposed approach, showing that our proposal can achieve cache hits against the traffic traces that simple conventional algorithms hardly cause any hits.

Cooperative caching is a key technique to reduce rapid growing video-on-demand's traffic by aggregating multiple cache storages. Existing strategies periodically calculate a sub-optimal allocation of the content caches in the network. Although such technique could reduce the generated traffic between servers, it comes with the cost of a large computational overhead. This overhead will be the cause of preventing these caches from following the rapid change in the access pattern. In this paper, we propose a light-weight scheme for cooperative caching by grouping contents and servers with color tags. In our proposal, we associate servers and caches through a color tag, with the aim to increase the effective cache capacity by storing different contents among servers. In addition to the color tags, we propose a novel hybrid caching scheme that divides its storage area into colored LFU (Least Frequently Used) and no-color LRU (Least Recently Used) areas. The colored LFU area stores color-matching contents to increase cache hit rate and no-color LRU area follows rapid changes in access patterns by storing popular contents regardless of their tags. On the top of the proposed architecture, we also present a new routing algorithm that takes benefit of the color tags information to reduce the traffic by fetching cached contents from the nearest server. Evaluation results, using a backbone network topology, showed that our color-tag based caching scheme could achieve a performance close to the sub-optimal one obtained with a genetic algorithm calculation, with only a few seconds of computational overhead. Furthermore, the proposed hybrid caching could limit the degradation of hit rate from 13.9% in conventional non-colored LFU, to only 2.3%, which proves the capability of our scheme to follow rapid insertions of new popular contents. Finally, the color-based routing scheme could reduce the traffic by up to 31.9% when compared with the shortest-path routing.

This paper deals with a broadcast network with a server and many users. The server has files of content such as music and videos, and each user requests one of these files, where each file consists of some separated layers like a file encoded by a scalable video coding. On the other hand, each user has a local memory, and a part of information of the files is cached (i.e., stored) in these memories in advance of users' requests. By using the cached information as side information, the server encodes files based on users' requests. Then, it sends a codeword through an error-free shared link for which all users can receive a common codeword from the server without error. We assume that the server transmits some layers up to a certain level of requested files at each different transmission rate (i.e., the codeword length per file size) corresponding to each level. In this paper, we focus on the region of tuples of these rates such that layers up to any level of requested files are recovered at users with an arbitrarily small error probability. Then, we give inner and outer bounds on this region.

This paper presents a hybrid push/pull streaming scheme to take advantage of both the interval caching-based push method and the mesh-based pull method. When a new peer joins, a mesh-based pull method is adopted to avoid the overhead to reorganize the structure only if all of its potential preceding peers are likely to leave before the end of its playback. Otherwise, an interval caching-based push method is adopted so that the better performance of the push method can be maintained until it completes the playback. We demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms compared with when either the interval caching-based push method or mesh-based pull method is employed alone.

Wireless caching is one of the promising technologies to mitigate the traffic burden of cellular networks and the large cost of deploying a higher volume of wired backhaul by introducing caching storage. In the manner of “cutting” wired equipments, all types of vehicles can be readily leveraged as serving access points with caching storage, where their moving nature should be taken into account to improve latency and data throughput. In this paper, we consider a mobility-aware vehicular caching which has a role in offloading delay-tolerable contents from cellular networks. We first clarify the influence of mobility in cellular caching networks, then set the mobility-aware optimization problem of vehicular caching to carry on delay-tolerable contents. Trace-driven numerical results based on rural and urban topographies show that, in presence of individual demand for delay-tolerable contents, the proposed vehicular caching scheme enhances the quality-of-service (QoS) (maximally twofold) relying on the contents delivery being centrally or distributedly controlled.

Energy efficiency is an important requirement to forth-coming NDN (Named Data Networking) networks and caching inherent to NDN is a main driver of energy reduction in such networks. This paper addresses the research question “Does caching really reduce the energy consumption of the entire network?”. To answer the question, we precisely estimate how caching reduces energy consumption of forth-coming commercial NDN networks by carefully considering configurations of NDN routers. This estimation reveals that energy reduction due to caching depends on energy-proportionality of NDN routers.

We introduce a novel cache replacement policy to improve the entire network performance of video delivery over content-centric networking (CCN). In the case of the CCN structure, we argue that: 1) for video multiplexing scenario, general cache strategies that ignore the intrinsic linear time characteristic of video requests are unable to make better use of the cache resources, and 2) it is inadequate to simply extend the existing research conclusions of file-oriented popularity to chunk-by-chunk popularity, which are widely used in CCN. Unlike previous works in this field, the proposed policy in this study, named two-level popularity-oriented time-to-hold cache replacement policy (TLP-TTH), is designed on the basis of the following principles. Firstly, the proposed cache replacement strategy is customized for video delivery by carefully considering the essential auto-correlated request feature of video chunks within a video file. Furthermore, the popularity in video delivery is subdivided into two levels, namely chunk-level access probability and file-level popularity, in order to efficiently utilize cache resources. We evaluated the proposed policy in both a hierarchical topology and a real network based hybrid topology, and took viewers departure into consideration as well. The results validate that for video delivery over CCN, TLP-TTH policy improves the network performance from several aspects. In particular, we observed that the proposed policy not only increases the cache hit ratio at the edge of the network but the cache utilization at the intermediate routers is also improved markedly. Further, with respect to the video popularity variation scenario, the cache hit ratio of TLP-TTH policy responds sensitively to maintain efficient cache utilization.

To efficiently utilize storage resources, the in-network caching system of Information-Centric Networking has to deal with the popularity of huge content chunks which could cause large memory consumption. This paper presents a Popularity Monitoring based Gain-aware caching scheme, called PMG, which is an integrated design of cache placement and popularity monitoring. In PMG, by taking into account both the chunk popularity and the consumption saving of single cache hit, the cache placement process is transformed into a weighted popularity comparison, while the chunks with high cache gain are placed on the node closer to the content consumer. A Bloom Filter based sliding window algorithm, which is self-adaptive to the dynamic request rate, is proposed to capture the chunks with higher caching gain by Inter-Reference Gap (IRG) detection. Analysis shows that PMG can drastically reduce the memory consumption of popularity monitoring, and the simulation results confirm that our scheme can achieve popularity based cache placement and get better performance in terms of bandwidth saving and cache hit ratio when content popularity changes dynamically.

Content centric network (CCN) is conceived as a good candidate for a futuristic Internet paradigm due to its simple and robust communication mechanism. By directly applying the CCN paradigm in wireless multihop mobile ad hoc networks, we experience various kind of issues such as packet flooding, data redundancy, packet collisions, and retransmissions etc., due to the broadcast nature of the wireless channel. To cope with the problems, in this study, we propose a novel location-aware forwarding and caching scheme for CCN-based mobile ad hoc networks. Extensive simulations are performed by using simulator, named ndnSIM. Experiment results show that proposed scheme does better as compared to other schemes in terms of content retrieval time and the number of Interest retransmissions triggered in the network.