Optimal Proactive Cache Management in Mobile Networks

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has been proposed as an evolutionary framework to propel the current Internet network architecture towards a content oriented design. The on-network caching is one of the key features of the ICN architecture that truly differentiate it from current end-to-end TCP/IP based networks. Given the forecast that mobile data will play a significant role in engineering future networks, mobility-aware caching could be deemed as indispensable for improving the experience of mobile users. To this end, this paper propose a proactive caching with redirection (PCWR) approach for enhancing the support of seamless mobility within ICN networks as well as the Quality of Service (QoS). To achieve that, we model and formulate the underlying problem as an Integer Linear Programming problem to derive the optimal balance between content caching and redirection. Via a wide set of numerical investigations, we compare the proposed scheme with various previously defined caching schemes, in both un-capacitated and capacitated caching networks to explore the inherent trade-offs. The results reveal that the proposed framework lead to significant gains in network cost compare to other techniques. Moreover, the investigations shed further light into how network cost gain is impacted by the proportion of caching and redirection cost.