Time-To-Live Based Caching Mechanism with Nonlinear Pricing for Information-centric Networks

As content distribution over the Internet become more and more popular and important, future Internet architecture requires highly scalable infrastructures to distribute content efficiently. Information-Centric Networks (ICN) was proposed as a kind of important future Internet architecture to facilitate the contents distribution. ICN uses content name as the routing locator has been proposed for efficient contents distribution. In ICN, content is dynamically cached in routers, which is different from traditional content distribution networks that still use IP address as routing locator and cache content at distributed servers, and caching has been identified as a critical component for ICN. This paper proposes a time-based caching mechanism for Service Providers (SPs) to monetize caching. The SPs cache contents of Contents Providers (CPs) for a certain mount of time, depending on the payment from CPs.