SoftCaching: A framework for caching node selection and routing in Software-Defined Information Centric Internet of Things

A considerable demand for Internet of Things (IoT) services is causing exponential growth in Internet traffic. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) are complementary technologies for IoT services provisioning that reduce network traffic and service provisioning delays by caching content at intermediate nodes in the network. Existing research on Software-Defined Information-Centric Networking (SDICN) for IoT service provisioning suffers from two major challenges: (a) optimal caching node selection and (b) optimal path computation from content consumers to caching nodes based on end-to-end delay and link utilization constraints. We propose a SoftCaching framework that optimizes caching node selection for content publishers and computes the optimal routing path to caching nodes for content consumers. It computes optimal locations for caching nodes and finds optimal routing paths for IoT services to access cached content. SoftCaching analyzes network traffic on all nodes in the network and collects traffic metrics. It estimates the best possible caching nodes by using Waypoint Enforcement (WPE) and solving the traffic matrix using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and QR Factorization. WPE and SVD-based QR factorization provide optimal locations to cache the content for IoT services. Subsequently, SoftCaching uses a constraint-based shortest path algorithm to compute the optimal routing path from content consumers to caching nodes. We make sure that the caching node and the routing path selection follow delay and link utilization constraints. We perform extensive experiments for evaluation, and the results show that SoftCaching outperforms state-of-the-art caching schemes in terms of delay, link load, hop count, path stretch, and energy consumption metrics.