Caching Popular and Fresh IoT Contents at the Edge via Named Data Networking

Among the distinctive features of the Named Data Networking (NDN) paradigm, in-network caching plays a crucial role in improving data delivery performance. At the network edge, the benefits of in-network caching can be remarkable in terms of reduced network traffic and user-perceived access latency. Multiple strategies have been designed for caching static Internet contents in NDN routers, while less attention has been devoted to transient Internet of Things (IoT) data, which expire after a certain amount of time. In this work, we introduce a novel distributed and autonomous caching strategy where NDN nodes take decisions by considering the popularity of IoT data and their lifetime. The target is to cache the most popular data with the highest residual lifetime in order to maximize the cache hit ratio at the edge. Performance evaluation assessed with the ndnSIM network simulator shows that the proposed solution outperforms existing schemes available in the literature by guaranteeing, among others, the highest cache hit ratio and the shortest content retrieval time.