Content-Aware Planning Models for Information-Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has recently gained momentum as a promising paradigm for the next-generation Internet architecture. The first prototypes for ICN-capable routers have already been developed, and network operators will soon have the opportunity to experience the advantages introduced by this technology. However, to migrate the devices to this novel architecture, non-negligible investments should be made. Therefore, it is of utter importance to provide clear quantitative insights of the expected economic benefits that operators will experience by switching to the ICN paradigm. For these reasons, in this paper we tackle the content-aware network-planning problem, and we formulate a novel optimization model to study the migration to an ICN, in a budget-constrained scenario. Our formulation takes into account 1) traffic routing and 2) content caching. We further complement our contribution by designing a Randomized Rounding heuristic that scales up to realistic topologies composed of hundreds of nodes.