Joint Request Aggregation and Content Caching at the Edge via Named Data Networking

Request Aggregation and Content Caching are two built-in mechanisms within Named Data Networking. Despite the highly motivating gain aggregation and caching bring to the network edge, these two features have been traditionally addressed separately in the literature. This paper shows that integrating aggregation with caching can significantly improve network edge performance. We introduce a novel joint aggregation and caching model to characterize simultaneous aggregation and caching. An approximation method is also presented with the goal of computing system performance measures. In order to compare the performance of this system with a cache-only scenario, a primitive proactive caching scheme is designed to cache the result of the most resource-demanding requests. Considering the rise of edge computing and the imminent domination of IoT, transient and time-sensitive contents are the main focus of this paper. The results obtained by this paper show that applying joint aggregation and caching can enhance the user experience with edge computing services dedicated to reusable time-sensitive content.