This paper presents an optimal cooperative routing protocol (OCRP) aiming to improve the in-network cache utilization of the Content-Centric Networking (CCN). The objective of OCRP is to selectively aggregate the multiple flows of interest messages onto the same path in order to improve the cache utilization while mitigating the cache contention of the Content Stores (CSs) of CCN routers on the routing path. The proposed routing protocol consists of three processes: (1) Prefix Popularity Observation; (2) Prefix Group (Un)Subscription; and (3) Forwarding Information Base (FIB) Reconstruction. Prefix Popularity Observation observes the popularly cited prefixes to activate a prefix group (un)subscription function, which lets the Designated Router (DR) know which requester router wants to either join or leave a prefix group. Prefix Group (Un)Subscription lets the DR know which requester router is demanding to join or leave which prefix group. FIB Reconstruction reconstructs the FIB entries of the CCN routers involved in the newly computed optimal cooperative path of all prefix groups. The optimal routing path is obtained by binary linear optimization under a flow conservation constraint, cache contention mitigating constraint, and path length constraint. Two metrics of server load and round-trip hop distance are used to measure the performance of the proposed routing protocol. Simulation results from various network scenarios and various settings show advantages over the shortest path routing and our previously proposed cooperative routing schemes.

Motivated by the recent research in crosslayer design of cooperative wireless network, we propose a distributed cooperative routing algorithm for a multihop multi-relay wireless network to achieve selection diversity. We propose two algorithms, rate optimal path selection and outage optimal path selection, to satisfy the different requirements of the systems. Both algorithms work on distributed processing without requiring any centralized controller. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposal. The results of the simulations show that the proposed routing algorithms significantly improve the end-to-end data rate and outage performance compared with noncooperative routing protocols.