MultiCache: An overlay architecture for information-centric networking

It has become apparent for quite some time that the Internet has evolved from a network connecting pairs of end-hosts to a substrate for information dissemination. While this shift towards information centric networking has been clearly demonstrated by the proliferation of file sharing and content delivery applications, it has not been reflected in a corresponding shift in network architecture. To address this issue, we designed MultiCache, an information-centric architecture aiming at the efficient use of network resources. MultiCache is based on two primitives: multicast and caching. It exploits overlay multicast as a means for content delivery and takes advantage of multicast forwarding information to locate, in an anycast fashion, nearby caches that have been themselves fed via multicast. We evaluate MultiCache against a widespread file sharing application (BitTorrent) with respect to both network resource consumption and end-user experience.