Information-centric use of the Internet resulted in a new approach to the design of networks; content is decoupled from the hosts and is regarded as an independent addressable unit. This new approach, known as Information Centric Networks (ICN), relies on caching the content in multiple locations and retrieving the requested content from one of the content holders. Depending on how the content is consumed (e.g., some items are more popular overall, some are popular at a certain geography) and the storage capacity of routers, routers cache some content and evict some others based on their caching scheme. Thus, content population of the network changes over time.

The aim of this thesis is to understand how various caching algorithms affect the content availability (e.g., how long a particular content resides in the network or in a specific router, correlation between the content popularity and number of copies of the content, etc.) in the network. There are plenty of caching proposals in the literature (see for example [4] and schemes in [5]).

In the scope of this thesis, the student is expected to overview the caching solutions and implement some of these proposals to analyze the resulting content availability in the network. Hence, the thesis work includes both literature survey, implementation, and analysis.

Reading List

1. Jim Kurose, Information-centric networking: The evolution from circuits to packets to content, Computer Networks 66 (2014) 112–120 

2. George Xylomenos et al, A Survey of Information-Centric Networking Research, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 16, no. 2, second quarter 2014.  

3. Marica Amadeo et al. , Content-centric wireless networking: A survey, Computer Networks 72 (2014) 1–13. 

4. Wei Koong Chai, Diliang He, Ioannis Psaras and George Pavlou, Cache “Less for More” in Information-centric Networks, IFIP Networking 2012.  

5. Lorenzo Saino et al, Icarus: a Caching Simulator for Information Centric Networking (ICN), SimuTools, 2014 

6. CCNx https://www.ccnx.org/