An ICN-based Approach for Service Caching in Edge/Fog Environments

Edge and Fog computing represent today a realistic alternative to traditional cloud data centers in order to support data-intensive and time-sensitive applications, such as those laying under the Internet of Things (IoT) umbrella. One of the main problems associated to this is the service placement problem, or how to efficiently manage the available computing and storage resources while deploying the plethora of application services, to be made available to clients, at the network edge/fog? Due to the similarities shared by this problem and the traditional data caching problem, multiple researches started looking at the adaptation of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm to answer the aforementioned question, giving birth to what we depict as an ICN-Edge/Fog architecture. Leveraging such an architecture, we propose in this paper a novel service caching strategy, called 3Q, that is the first to argue on the caching of both, the service instances, consuming computing resources, as well as their associated source codes, consuming storage resources. Being characterized by its low-complexity and its low-overhead, 3Q proves to achieve near-optimal results in terms of cached services hits, latency and cloud usage.