Research On Caching Resource Management Of Information-Centric Networking And The Related Applications

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has changed the existing pattern of IP (Internet Protocol) networks. With the rapid development of the contents over the Internet, one common behavior for users to use the Internet is to access the massive contents. The basic action of ICN is to request and obtain information, rather than achieving the end-to-end connection of traditional IP networks, which benefits content distribution efficiently. According to the principles that simplifying the backbone network and making the edge network intelligent, the backbone network is designed with the distributed ICN mode, while the local area network is designed with the centralized network mode. It is worth mentioning that the distributed ICN mainly refers to the hourglass model of the current IP networks, and treats the content chunk as the narrow waist,replacing the traditional IP waist. The advantages of this structure are facilitating the global interconnection as well as supporting the prosperity and development of all levels over and under the network layer. It contains two kinds of packets, which are interest packet and data packet.Meanwhile, its routers contain three data structures, which are pending interest table (PIT), forwarding information base (FIB) and content store(CS). This design enables the aggregation of the requests and the reuse of the contents cached in the routers.This dissertation mainly focuses on the problems about caching redundancy of ICN, 'caching resource utility of ICN, as well as how to apply the caching technology of ICN into wireless networks and allocate the related resources, etc. In addition, this dissertation does some researches on the open source code CCNx and the simulation platform NS-3 to realize the prototype system of ICN. The main contributions are listed below:(1) Proposing a caching decision strategy of ICN based on the correlation of the caching states.Considering the purpose of caching in ICN is to reduce the traffic redundancy effectively, but it will cause caching redundancy because of caching the contents in different locations of the network. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on proposing a caching strategy for placing contents to optimize the allocation of the caching resource. As we know, the caching strategy includes two parts which are caching replacement strategy and caching decision strategy. This study focuses on that the node chooses to cache the arriving data packet initiatively, analyzing the related factors that the caching capacity of the path, different caching replacement frequency of nodes on different locations, and the influence between nodes about whether to cache some content or not, and then proposes a caching decision strategy of ICN based on the correlation of the caching states. By considering the above factors, the probabilities that nodes cache some data packet can be computed. According to the probabilities, the in-network caching resource can be allocated, which eliminates the caching redundancy effectively, improves the diversity of the contents cached in the network, increases the average utilization rate of caching nodes, and reduces the load of content servers greatly. It could optimize the allocation of caching resource and ensure some caching rule of the nodes on the path through the cooperation between nodes.(2) Proposing an automatic resource allocation and management mechanism in ICN based on contents differentiation.The original conceivement of ICN is to utilize the in-network caching resource to save the bandwidth resource. However, in the existing works about ICN, the contents cached in the routers are not distinguished. There is no consideration about differentiation (the requesting rate of users for different types of contents is different, such as video). Meanwhile, the cache size of the routers in ICN is limited in the actual deployment. In order to meet the requirements for massive contents better as well as make the full and effective use of the limited caching resource, this dissertation divides the in-network users' traffic of ICN into several classes in accordance with certain priority, and then weights these content classes with analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Furthermore, this dissertation uses control theory to establish the self-control model of the caching node. Based on the above method of content classification and the control model, the caching node will assign different caching space for different content classes, providing differentiated quality of service(QoS, such as caching hit rate and delay, etc.). This model adjusts the caching space for each class with the control loop once in a while to achieve our desired performance. With the control loop, the caching space of each node could be maintained as the constant, at the same time, the performance could be stable. Thus, network operators manage the contents cached in each caching node and provide different levels of content accelerating service for content operators.(3) Proposing a wireless network architecture and resource allocation model with integrated caching resource of ICN.Currently, the researches on applying the caching technology of ICN into wireless networks, integration of edge computing and wireless networks, applying software-defined networking into wireless networks have been studied more and more in the academia. However,communicating devices, caching devices and computing devices are all the underlying resources for users. The users won't pay attention to the layout of the underlying resources, and they just care about quality of experience. Considering different resources can meet different application requirements for users, and different heterogeneous wireless accessing modes are complementary with each other in current wireless networks,this dissertation integrates the caching capacity of ICN and computing capacity into the communicating devices, besides the legacy communicating capacity, providing the better QoE and improving the performance of the network. Software-defined method is a good way to manage and control different heterogeneous wireless accessing, mode as well as the underlying resources. Programming the allocation of different resources with different accessing mode can ensure the timeliness on the users' side and achieve the green energy efficiency. Furthermore,this research designs a model to choose the access network for users with the above wireless networks architecture integrating the caching resource of ICN, according to the current network conditions and the underlying resources wanted by users. The goals are to make sure the uniform allocation of resources and save energy consumption, as well as guarantee QoE, such as the timeliness for applications.