Abstract
Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a new paradigm proposing a shift in the main Internet architecture from a host-centric communication model to a content-centric model. ICN architectures target to meet user demands for accessing the information regardless of its location. A major building block of ICNs concerns caching strategies. Concomitantly, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technologies are considered the main pattern for the Internet of Things (IoT). Unifying M2M and ICN into a single framework raises the challenge of cache coherence. In this paper, we propose a novel cache coherence mechanism to check the validity of cache contents. We also propose a caching strategy suitable to M2M environment. Extensive experimentations are conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposals. They show that the combination of our two proposed schemes results in a notable improvement in content validity at the expenses of a certain degradation in both server hit and hop reduction ratios. I. INTRODUCTION Internet was originally designed to share scarce resources among a limited number of static nodes with trusted communications channels. Efficient and scalable content distribution, mobility and security still challenge the current Internet architecture. Hence, Internet re-architecture is no more and option and has become an imperative requirement to the healthy growth of the Internet of the future. This has lead researchers to introduce a novel paradigm namely Information Centric Networking (ICN) [7]. The cornerstone of ICN is the content which the user requests rather than the location of the node that provides this content: it is then a shift from a host-centric view of the network to a content-centric one. In order to alleviate the pressure on the network bandwidth caused by the tremendous traffic growth, ICN provides in-network caching to distribute content in a scalable, cost-efficient and secure manner. Caching is not a revolutionary concept; it has already been widely used by the host-centric Internet in the Web, P2P systems and Content Distribution Networks (CDNs). However, with the absence of unique identification, current caching system may handle the same content at different network location as different contents. In addition, existing cache systems are designed for a specific traffic and applications, they are not generic. Furthermore, in traditional caching systems, cache nodes are predetermined and fixed, unlike in ICN caching, caches are ubiquitous.