Improved content management for information-centric networking in SDN-based wireless mesh network

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new network paradigm that emphasizes information and content, and considers the content name rather than the existing destination address as the routing criterion. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) can be a great help to the feasibility of ICN because it provides a network with flexibility and continuous management. In this paper, we present a method for significantly improving the efficiency of ICN content management using the SDN concept in a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) environment. Each mesh node of a WMN can utilize its memory and storage as a cache, and the cache server, which has a sufficient amount of space, is used for high-capacity content. SDN enables a network to support various caching techniques, such as content identification, cache location decision, and cache distribution on the network layer. In particular, the SDN described in this paper significantly improves the cache distribution performance and content management efficiency through a cache location decision considering the features of wireless communication, a mesh topology, and constraints to the hardware capacity and cache space. The proposed system was evaluated through actual experiments. In the environment where the clients are locally converged, the proposed SDN-based content management schemes decrease the average response delay by 22.74% with only 4.59 kb control traffic load per second in comparison to other in-network cache schemes.