LPCE-Based Replacement Scheme for Enhancing Caching Performance in Named Data Networking

Abstract

The substantial surge in users has adversely impacted the performance of the present IP-based Internet. Named data networking (NDN) emerges as a future alternative, given its distributed content caching system, where data can be cached in multiple routers and retrieved from the closest one instead of the original producer, enhancing content availability, reducing latency, and minimizing data loss. This paper introduces the less popular content eviction (LPCE) policy, a novel cache replacement scheme designed to enhance the caching performance of the conventional LFU (least frequently used) policy in NDN routers, thereby improving overall network efficiency. The proposed method subsumes LFU and FIFO (first in first out) policies and employs an additional list controlled by the LRU (least recently used) policy. Utilizing the ccnSim simulator, we conduct a comparison of LPCE’s performance with that of the LFU technique and other competing caching techniques, considering variations in several simulation parameters. Experimental results reveal that the proposed LPCE algorithm excels over others across a majority of performance metrics, such as cache hit ratio, content delivery delay, upstream hop count, network traffic, and producers’ load. Besides, the findings indicate that LPCE outperforms LFU, with an increase in cache hit ratio ranging from 1.32% to 5.75%.