Branch and Bound: A Paradigm of Elastic Network Caching

Content delivery is an increasingly dominating functionality of the Internet, and continuously poses significant pressures on the networking infrastructure as well as content providers. As a general mechanism to improve efficiency, caching has been used in several approaches; e.g., CDNs, caching proxies, and Redundancy Elimination (RE). In this paper, we propose a new caching paradigm called Branch and Bound Caching (BBC) that addresses the disadvantages of existing approaches. Similar to RE, BBC caches co-locate with routers and are an integral part of the networks. However, while RE caches anonymous packets and use them to compress the traffic, BBC caches named objects and use them to satisfy requests. In BBC, the functionalities of forwarding and caching are loosely coupled using our “branch and bound” mechanism so that the cached content is utilized elastically without incurring additional overhead for cache misses. We report preliminary simulation results to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal.