NCache: Neighborhood Cooperative Caching in Named Data Networking

Improved response time and resilience to network failures are heavily influenced by the routing and caching design strategies in content centric networking. In-network caching improves response time in the network. On-path caching techniques are simple and commonly used. In this paper we present NCache, a neighborhood cooperative caching technique which brings cooperation amongst neighborhood routers both in searching/retrieval of the content and also in caching decisions. It retains the simplicity of on-path caching techniques while leveraging the cooperation amongst the routers in the neighborhood to deliver improved performance. We formalize the interaction of a router with its neighbors as an extension to the interest packet structure of Named Data Networking. We perform simulation experiments with both custom and standard network topologies using a discrete event simulator. Our results show that NCache provides significant improvement in performance in terms of cache hit ratio, response time (content access latency) and overall cache utilization when compared with the state-of-the-art on-path caching techniques.