COCP: Coupling Parameters Content Placement Strategy for In-Network Caching-Based Content-Centric Networking

On-path caching is the prominent module in Content-Centric Networking (CCN), equipped with the capability to handle the demands of future networks such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and vehicular networks. The main focus of the CCN caching module is data dissemination within the network. Most of the existing strategies of in-network caching in CCN store the content at the maximum number of routers along the downloading path. Consequently, content redundancy in the network increases significantly, whereas the cache hit ratio and network performance decrease due to the unnecessary utilization of limited cache storage. Moreover, content redundancy adversely affects the cache resources, hit ratio, latency, bandwidth utilization, and server load. We proposed an in-network caching placement strategy named Coupling Parameters to Optimize Content Placement (COCP) to address the content redundancy and associated problems. The novelty of the technique lies in its capability to minimize content redundancy by creating a balanced cache space along the routing path by considering request rate, distance, and available cache space. The proposed approach minimizes the content redundancy and content dissemination within the network by using appropriate locations while increasing the cache hit ratio and network performance. The COCP is implemented in the simulator (Icarus) to evaluate its performance in terms of the cache hit ratio, path stretch, latency, and link load. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed COCP strategy. The proposed COCP technique has been compared with the existing state-of-the-art techniques, namely, Leave Copy Everywhere (LCE), Leave Copy Down (LCD), ProbCache, Cache Less for More (CL4M), and opt-Cache. The results obtained with different cache sizes and popularities show that our proposed caching strategy can achieve up to 91.46% more cache hits, 19.71% reduced latency, 35.43% improved path stretch and 38.14% decreased link load. These results confirm that the proposed COCP strategy has the potential capability to handle the demands of future networks such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and vehicular networks.