Characteristic time routing in information centric networks

Information centric networking (ICN) aims to transform today's Internet from a host-centric model to a content-centric one by caching content internally within the network at storage-enabled nodes. Recently, multiple routing and cache management strategies have been proposed [1,2,3,4,5,6] to improve the user-level performance, primarily latency in ICN. In this paper, we define latency as the download time for a piece of content. In this paper, we propose a simple routing strategy that leverages the concept of characteristic time to improve latency. Characteristic time for a content in a cache indicates the amount of time in future a recently accessed content is likely to remain in that cache. Our proposed algorithm namely, Characteristic Time Routing (CTR) uses characteristic time information to forward requests to caches where the content is likely to be found. CTR augments native routing strategies (e.g., Dijkstra's algorithm), works with existing cache management and cache replacement policies and thus can be implemented in ICN prototypes with minimal effort. We perform exhaustive simulation in the Icarus simulator [7] using realistic Internet topologies (e.g., GEANT, WIDE, TISCALI, ROCKETFUEL [8]) and demonstrate that the CTR algorithm provides approximately 10-50% improvement in latency over state-of-the-art routing and caching management strategies for ICN for a wide range of simulation parameters.