HCache: A Hybrid Caching Strategy in Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric Networking (ICN) has attracted much attention, as a promising paradigm towards future Internet. In-network caching is one of its key features. Existing cache schemes can be categorized into two groups, i.e., deterministic caching and probabilistic caching. However, the majority of current strategies employ a uniform caching strategy throughout the same cache network, which is hard to meet the demands of both users and ISPs. To this end, we propose a hybrid caching strategy (named HCache), which employs different caching methods in different areas and combine their advantages. Specifically, the cache network is partitioned into core and edge areas. The edge areas apply the deterministic caching method to reduce access delay (user perspective), while the probabilistic caching is used at the core area to enrich the cache diversity and reduce inter-domain traffic (ISP perspective). Relevant simulations indicate that HCache outperforms the pure probabilistic and pure deterministic caching schemes in terms of access delay, cache hit ratio and bandwidth savings.