Quality-of-Service-Linked Privileged Content-Caching Mechanism for Named Data Networks

The domain of information-centric networking (ICN) is expanding as more devices are becoming a part of connected technologies. New methods for serving content from a producer to a consumer are being explored, and Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of them. The NDN protocol routes the content from a producer to a consumer in a network using content names, instead of IP addresses. This facility, combined with content caching, efficiently serves content for very large networks consisting of a hybrid and ad hoc topology with both wired and wireless media. This paper addresses the issue of the quality-of-service (QoS) dimension for content delivery in NDN-based networks. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) classifies QoS traffic as (prompt, reliable), prompt, reliable, and regular, and assigns corresponding priorities for managing the content. QoS-linked privileged content caching (QLPCC) proposes strategies for Pending Interest Table (PIT) and content store (CS) management in dedicated QoS nodes for handling priority content. QoS nodes are intermediately resourceful NDN nodes between content producers and consumers which specifically manage QoS traffic. The results of this study are compared with EQPR, PRR probability cache, and Least Frequently Used (LFU) and Least Fresh First (LFF) schemes, and QLPCC outperformed the latter-mentioned schemes in terms of QoS-node CS size vs. hit rate (6% to 47%), response time vs, QoS-node CS size (65% to 90%), and hop count vs. QoS-node CS size (60% to 84%) from the perspectives of priority traffic and overall traffic. QLPCC performed predictably when the NDN node count was increased from 500 to 1000, showing that the strategy is scalable.