Throughput-Delay Tradeoffs in Content-Centric Wireless Networks

We study the throughput and delay characteristics of wireless networks based on an information-centric network architecture, where users are mainly interested in retrieving content stored in the network, rather than in maintaining source-destination communication. Nodes are assumed to be uniformly distributed in the network area. Each node has a limited-capacity content store, which it uses to cache contents according to the proposed caching scheme. Requested content follows a general popularity distribution, and users employ multihop communication to retrieve the requested content from the closest cache. We derive the throughput-delay tradeoff of the information-centric wireless network model and solve the caching optimization problem. We then evaluate the network performance for a Zipf content popularity distribution, letting the number of content types and the network size both go to infinity. Finally, we extend our analysis to hybrid cellular networks where, in addition to wireless nodes, there are a number of base stations uniformly distributed at random in the network area.