Cost-aware caching: optimizing cache provisioning and object placement in ICN

Caching is frequently used by Internet Service Providers as a viable technique to reduce the latency perceived by end users, while jointly offloading network traffic. While the cache hit-ratio is generally considered in the literature as the dominant performance metric for such type of systems, in this paper we argue that a critical missing piece has so far been neglected. Adopting a radically different perspective, in this paper we explicitly account for the cost of content retrieval, i.e. the cost associated to the external bandwidth needed by an ISP to retrieve the contents requested by its customers. Interestingly, we discover that classical cache provisioning techniques that maximize cache efficiency (i.e., the hit-ratio), lead to suboptimal solutions with higher overall cost. To show this mismatch, we propose two optimization models that either minimize the overall costs or maximize the hit-ratio, jointly providing cache sizing, object placement and path selection. We formulate a polynomial-time greedy algorithm to solve the two problems and analytically prove its optimality. We provide numerical results and show that significant cost savings are attainable via a cost-aware design

Cost-Aware Optimisation of Cache Allocation for Information-Centric Networking

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this record.Information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging paradigm that decouples content from the host to achieve fast and cost-efficient communication and content distribution in the future Internet. A key feature of ICN is the deployment of ubiquitous in-network caching to speed up service delivery and improve network resource utilisation. ICN caching has been widely studied in terms of caching strategies and caching performance. However, the economic aspect of ICN has received marginal consideration so far, although it is vital to understand the potential cost-efficiency of ICN before its wide deployment in service provider network. To address this issue, we propose a cost-aware caching scheme to study the Quality-of-Service (QoS) and cost of ICN and investigate the inner association between them. Two new models are designed to characterise the cost and QoS of ICN with arbitrary topology under heterogeneous bursty content requests. A multi-objective evolution algorithm is adopted to find the optimal cache resource allocation. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in achieving cost-efficiency and QoS guarantee in ICN caching

The effect of caching on a model of content and access provider revenues in Information-Centric Networks

International audienceIn this paper, we consider a game between an Internet Service (access) Provider (ISP) and content provider (CP) on a platform of end-user demand. A price-convex demand-response is motivated based on the delay-sensitive applications that are expected to be subjected to the assumed usage-priced priority service over best-eort service. Thus, we are considering a two-sided market with multiclass demand wherein one class (that under consideration herein) is delay-sensitive. Both the Internet and proposed Information Centric Network (ICN, encompassing Content Centric Networking (CCN)) scenarios are considered. For our purposes, the ICN case is basically dierent in the polarity of the side-payment (from ISP to CP in an ICN) and, more importantly here, in that content caching by the ISP is incentivized. A price-convex demand-response model is extended to account for content caching. The corresponding Nash equilibria are derived and studied numerically

Performance Analysis and Optimisation of In-network Caching for Information-Centric Future Internet

The rapid development in wireless technologies and multimedia services has radically shifted the major function of the current Internet from host-centric communication to service-oriented content dissemination, resulting a mismatch between the protocol design and the current usage patterns. Motivated by this significant change, Information-Centric Networking (ICN), which has been attracting ever-increasing attention from the communication networks research community, has emerged as a new clean-slate networking paradigm for future Internet. Through identifying and routing data by unified names, ICN aims at providing natural support for efficient information retrieval over the Internet. As a crucial characteristic of ICN, in-network caching enables users to efficiently access popular contents from on-path routers equipped with ubiquitous caches, leading to the enhancement of the service quality and reduction of network loads. Performance analysis and optimisation has been and continues to be key research interests of ICN. This thesis focuses on the development of efficient and accurate analytical models for the performance evaluation of ICN caching and the design of optimal caching management schemes under practical network configurations. This research starts with the proposition of a new analytical model for caching performance under the bursty multimedia traffic. The bursty characteristic is captured and the closed formulas for cache hit ratio are derived. To investigate the impact of topology and heterogeneous caching parameters on the performance, a comprehensive analytical model is developed to gain valuable insight into the caching performance with heterogeneous cache sizes, service intensity and content distribution under arbitrary topology. The accuracy of the proposed models is validated by comparing the analytical results with those obtained from extensive simulation experiments. The analytical models are then used as cost-efficient tools to investigate the key network and content parameters on the performance of caching in ICN. Bursty traffic and heterogeneous caching features have significant influence on the performance of ICN. Therefore, in order to obtain optimal performance results, a caching resource allocation scheme, which leverages the proposed model and targets at minimising the total traffic within the network and improving hit probability at the nodes, is proposed. The performance results reveal that the caching allocation scheme can achieve better caching performance and network resource utilisation than the default homogeneous and random caching allocation strategy. To attain a thorough understanding of the trade-off between the economic aspect and service quality, a cost-aware Quality-of-Service (QoS) optimisation caching mechanism is further designed aiming for cost-efficiency and QoS guarantee in ICN. A cost model is proposed to take into account installation and operation cost of ICN under a realistic ISP network scenario, and a QoS model is presented to formulate the service delay and delay jitter in the presence of heterogeneous service requirements and general probabilistic caching strategy. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism in achieving better service quality and lower network cost. In this thesis, the proposed analytical models are used to efficiently and accurately evaluate the performance of ICN and investigate the key performance metrics. Leveraging the insights discovered by the analytical models, the proposed caching management schemes are able to optimise and enhance the performance of ICN. To widen the outcomes achieved in the thesis, several interesting yet challenging research directions are pointed out