Towards improving the efficiency of ICN packet-caches

In-network packet-level caching is one of the most promising features offered by Information-centric Networking (ICN) architectures. In ICN, routers can use their queueing buffers as temporal storage units, thus allowing on-path caching by exploiting the network's storage resources. Packet-caches can be highly beneficial for content delivery, but they are also known to have three significant weaknesses: (i) packet-granularity produces huge cache indexes, (ii) Zipf-like content popularity penalizes the hit-ratio at core nodes and (iii) any discontinuity in the stored packets disrupts RTT-based congestion control. This paper presents OPC, a novel caching management strategy designed to support wire-speed in-network caching, while dealing with the above problems. OPC works at the object-level, thus reducing indexing requirements, is destined for access routers, thus avoiding the small hit-ratios of caches at core-nodes, and stores contiguous groups of packets, thus easing RTT-based congestion control.