Design and evaluation of cost-aware information centric routers

Albeit an important goal of Information Centric Networking (ICNs) is traffic reduction, a perhaps even more important aspect follows from the above achievement: the reduction of ISP operational costs that comes as consequence of the reduced load on transit and provider links. Surprisingly, to date this crucial aspect has not been properly taken into account, neither in the architectural design, nor in the operation and management of ICN proposals. In this work, we instead design a distributed cost-aware scheme that explicitly considers the cost heterogeneity among different links. We contrast our scheme with both traditional cost-blind schemes and optimal results. We further propose an architectural design to let multiple schemes be interoperable, and finally assess whether overlooking implementation details could hamper the practical relevance of our design. Numerical results show that our cost-aware scheme can yield significant cost savings, that are furthermore consistent over a wide range of scenarios.