A cache-aware routing scheme for information-centric networks

In recent years, the information-centric networking (ICN) concept has been attracting increasing attention of the research community. The aim is to overcome intrinsic inefficiencies of the existing host-to-host communication paradigm, as well as to provide new and enhanced services to mobile and fixed users. A key feature of ICN is the support for in-network content caching. In this paper, we present a new cache-aware routing scheme for ICN. Our scheme takes into account the information about the locations of caches in the network and constructs delivery paths for efficient content dissemination. The proposed approach does not impose additional signaling overhead in the network; while at the same time it is agnostic of the cached contents. The performance of the proposed scheme is verified by simulation studies, which show an up to 50% delay reduction compared to traditional routing approaches.