Caching in information centric networking: A survey

Internet usage has drastically shifted from host-centric end-to-end communication to receiver-driven content retrieval. In order to adapt to this change, a handful of innovative information/content centric networking (ICN) architectures have recently been proposed. One common and important feature of these architectures is to leverage built-in network caches to improve the transmission efficiency of content dissemination. Compared with traditional Web Caching and CDN Caching, ICN Cache takes on several new characteristics: cache is transparent to applications, cache is ubiquitous, and content to be cached is more ine-grained. These distinguished features pose new challenges to ICN caching technologies. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of state-of-art techniques aiming to address these issues, with particular focus on reducing cache redundancy and improving the availability of cached content. As a new research area, this paper also points out several interesting yet challenging research directions in this subject.