Adaptive TTL Control to Minimize Resource Cost in Hierarchical Caching Networks

SUMMARY Content caching networks like Information-Centric Networking (ICN) are beneficial to reduce the network traffic by storing content data on routers near to users. In ICN, it becomes an important issue to manage system resources, such as storage and network bandwidth, which are influenced by cache characteristics of each cache node. Meanwhile, cache aging techniques based on Time-To-Live (TTL) of content facilitate analyzing cache characteristics and can realize appropriate resource management by setting efficient TTLs. However, it is difficult to search for the efficient TTLs in a distributed cache system connected by multiple cache nodes. Therefore, we propose an adaptive control mechanism of the TTL value of content in distributed cache systems by using predictive models which can estimate the impact of the TTL values on network resources and cache performance. Furthermore, we show the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.