Pre-caching: A proactive scheme for caching video traffic in named data mesh networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a future Internet architecture with the potential to solve myriad issues arising from traditional Internet architecture. By providing in-network caching of content, ICN provides for efficient delivery of content, such as streaming video, that occupies most of the bandwidth and resources of the Internet. Named data network (NDN) is a promising ICN architecture that supports video streaming (both live and on-demand) but does not fully exploit the full potential of in-network caching. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for pre-caching, based on the popularity, chunks of large content objects, such as videos, once they are requested by a consumer. We provide for collaboration in caching between neighboring content routers (CRs) in mesh networks, keeping the cache capacity constraints of CRs in mind. We characterize pre-caching as an optimization problem in which the goal is to jointly minimize the number of hops from the caching node to the consumer and the number of replicas, while observing the cache capacity of each CR. We implement and empirically evaluate each of the schemes and find substantially better than the existing NDN-based schemes.