An energy-efficient distributed in-network caching scheme for green content-centric networks

Due to the in-network caching capability, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) has emerged as one of the most promising architectures for the diffusion of contents over the Internet. Most existing works on CCN focus on network resource utilization, and the energy consumption aspect is largely ignored. Moreover, the existing centralized schemes for CCN may not be practical to be implemented in realistic networks due to the distributed architecture of the Internet. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient distributed in-network caching scheme for CCN. In the proposed scheme, each content router only needs locally available information to make caching decisions considering both caching energy consumption and transport energy consumption. We formulate the energy-efficient distributed in-network caching problem as a non-cooperative game. Through rigorous mathematical analysis, we prove that pure strategy Nash equilibria exist in the distributed solution, and it always has a strategy profile that implements the socially optimal configuration, even if the routers are self-interested in nature. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme is competitive to the centralized scheme, and has superior performance compared to the other widely used schemes in CCN. Besides, it exhibits a fast convergence speed when the capacity of content routers varies.