ICN-Based Enhanced Cooperative Caching for Multimedia Streaming in Resource Constrained Vehicular Environment

Today, with the worldwide offer and rapid increment in multimedia applications on the web, the demands of users to get them accessed are also increasing prominently. The users in vehicular environment too expect efficient multimedia streaming while travelling on the road. However, the high mobility of vehicles as well as the limited transmission range of infrastructure components in IP based network provides low performance by offering high delay and additional network overhead. To provide better Quality of Experience (QoE) with high performance, Information Centric Networking (ICN) is blended with vehicular environment. Caching the content inside network nodes is inherent feature of ICN with various associated benefits such as low content retrieval delay, less network traffic, path reduction and so on. However, challenges still exists for caching the content due to resource constrained network environment (such as limited cache capacity, node battery) as well as for secure delivery of cached data. To solve these challenges and to enhance network performance, we propose a cooperative caching scheme in hierarchical network architecture that jointly considers cache location as well as combined content popularity and predicted future rating score while making caching decision. The proposed approach uses two layer hierarchical architecture where nodes in edge layer are divided into clusters. The proposed scheme uses modified Weighted Clustering Algorithms (WCA) for selection of cluster heads which are then used to decide cache location. A probability matrix is used to compute content caching probability which considers both popularity and predicted future rating of content. The proposed approach dynamically predict the user’s preferences using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) - a machine learning technique which eventually provides prediction of future rating. Based on the selection of both cache location and content to cache, the proposed scheme can effectively cache the content in the network. Further, to deal with the secure delivery of cached content, this work supports legitimate user authorization at edge nodes. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in MATLAB parallel computing toolkit. The results prove significant caching improvement in terms of cache hit, hop reduction and average delay using our proposed scheme.

I. Introduction

Traditional vehicular networks are expansion of mobile networks for providing communication services to various applications such as autonomous vehicle, traffic management, and road safety etc. [1]. Nowadays, apart from the services related to the management and safety measures for road traffic, the interest of most autonomous vehicle users are focusing more towards entertainment services. An unprecedented growth in user’s requests on internet is mainly caused by multimedia streaming, usually encompassing watching and sharing of video, audio and image on different platforms. The seamless content delivery is essential in order to have better quality of experience (QoE). However, it is difficult to achieve long term vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) connections in highly dynamic environment. Moreover, the short transmission range of infrastructure components such as Road side units (RSU) and Base Stations (BS) will provide inefficient solutions for V2I communication (refer Fig. 1). The frequent connection loss and connection re-establishment due to limited range and high mobility will introduce heavy network traffic overhead and content retrieval delay [2]. Besides, the condition will get worse for users with constrained resources such as battery and storage etc. In this scenario, it is not feasible to provide current IP based services which establishes end to end connection for communication among V2I and V2V. This paper incorporated Information Centric Networking (ICN) with vehicular environment to reduce network traffic load which provides support for anytime, anywhere delivery of content. Caching the content replicas by the network nodes is inbuilt feature of the ICN [4] with its various associated benefits such as less content retrieval delay, shorten path stretch, reduced network traffic and, optimal resource utilization etc. However, how to cache multimedia content replicas to achieve the most benefit is a challenge [5]. The challenge of caching actually revolves around three questions: 1) which location should be preferred for caching replicas, 2) what content should be cached and 3) How the cached content needs to be distributed to user. Fig. 1.

Vehicular network architecture [3].