Performance analysis and optimisation of in-network caching for information-centric future Internet

The rapid development in wireless technologies and multimedia services has radically shifted the major function of the current Internet from host-centric communication to service-oriented content dissemination, resulting a mismatch between the protocol design and the current usage patterns. Motivated by this significant change, Information-Centric Networking (ICN), which has been attracting ever-increasing attention from the communication networks research community, has emerged as a new clean-slate networking paradigm for future Internet. Through identifying and routing data by unified names, ICN aims at providing natural support for efficient information retrieval over the Internet. As a crucial characteristic of ICN, in-network caching enables users to efficiently access popular contents from on-path routers equipped with ubiquitous caches, leading to the enhancement of the service quality and reduction of network loads. Performance analysis and optimisation has been and continues to be key research interests of ICN. This thesis focuses on the development of efficient and accurate analytical models for the performance evaluation of ICN caching and the design of optimal caching management schemes under practical network configurations. This research starts with the proposition of a new analytical model for caching performance under the bursty multimedia traffic. The bursty characteristic is captured and the closed formulas for cache hit ratio are derived. To investigate the impact of topology and heterogeneous caching parameters on the performance, a comprehensive analytical model is developed to gain valuable insight into the caching performance with heterogeneous cache sizes, service intensity and content distribution under arbitrary topology. The accuracy of the proposed models is validated by comparing the analytical results with those obtained from extensive