Optimal design of Information Centric Networks

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has recently gained momentum as a promising paradigm for the next-generation Internet architecture. The first prototypes for ICN-capable routers have already been developed; however, to migrate the devices to this novel architecture, non-negligible investments should be made. Therefore, it is of utter importance to provide clear quantitative insights of the expected economic benefits that operators will experience by switching to the ICN paradigm. For these reasons, in this paper we tackle the content-aware network-planning problem, and we formulate a novel optimization model to study the migration to an ICN, in a budget-constrained scenario. Our formulation takes into accurate account traffic routing and content caching. We prove that the optimization problem is NP-Hard, then we formulate heuristics to efficiently solve it. An extensive simulation campaign with real network topologies shows that our greedy heuristic cuts the computation time while finding close to optimal solutions, and therefore can effectively support network operators to evaluate the effects of a migration to ICN.