IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 21, NO. 6, JUNE 2017 1313
Ant Colony Optimization-Inspired ICN Routing with Content Concentration and
Similarity Relation
Jianhui Lv, Student Member, IEEE, Xingwei Wang, and Min Huang
Abstract—In this letter, we propose a novel Ant Colony
Optimization (ACO)-inspired Information-Centric Networking
(ICN) Routing mechanism based on Content concentration and
Similarity relation (AIRCS). At first, we propose a continuous
content concentration model to conduct the interest forwarding.
Second, we propose a similarity relation model between two
content routers to act as a heuristic factor to facilitate the interest
forwarding. Third, we propose a computation scheme about the
forwarding probability with content concentration and similarity
relation to determine which outgoing interface is used to forward
interest request. Finally, we design the ICN routing mechanism
based on the probabilistic forwarding to retrieve the closest
content copy. The experimental results show that AIRCS has
good performance.
Index Terms—Information-centric networking, ant colony
optimization, content concentration, similarity relation.
I. INTRODUCTION
A
LTHOUGH Information-Centric Networking (ICN), as a
promising paradigm, has brought the profound evolution
from address-centric communication mode to information-
centric one [1] with some advantages such as achieving content
distribution and supporting content mobility, its routing is
facing some severe challenges such as the explosive growth
of routing table, difficult retrieval of the closest content copy,
and possible failures of interest requests. It is very unfortunate
that the current ICN routing schemes have difficulties to solve
the above mentioned challenges.
Nowadays, the Bio-Inspired Networking (BIN) [2] has been
studied to provide some services such as routing optimization
and task scheduling, while minimizing the manual interven-
tion, due to its capacities of self-evolution, self-organization
and survivability [3] to address networking issues, for exam-
ple, ICN routing problems. At first, BIN has the ability
to adapt to the varying environments by the self-evolution.
The explosive growth of ICN routing table can be indeed
considered as one of such varying environments, and we can
Manuscript received August 22, 2016; revised October 17, 2016; accepted
November 14, 2016. Date of publication November 22, 2016; date of current
version June 8, 2017. This work is supported by the National Science Founda-
tion for Distinguished Young Scholars of China under Grant Nos. 61225012
and 71325002; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under
Grant No. 61572123. The associate editor coordinating the review of this letter
and approving it for publication was B. Rong. (Corresponding author:
Xingwei Wang.)
J. Lv is with the College of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeast-
ern University, Shenyang 110169, China (e-mail: lvjianhui2012@163.com).
X. Wang is with the College of Software, Northeastern University,
Shenyang 110169, China (e-mail: wangxw@mail.neu.edu.cn).
M. Huang is with the College of Information Science and Engi-
neering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China (e-mail:
mhuang@mail.neu.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2016.2631515
use BIN to solve the problem of the explosive growth of
routing table. Secondly, BIN can find the optimal solution by
the self-organization, whilst ICN routing aims at finding the
closest content copy, thus the content retrieval in ICN can be
addressed by BIN easily. Thirdly, BIN can quickly recover
from the failures by the survivability, whilst ICN needs to
cope with the failures caused by the content movement, thus
the mobility in ICN can be addressed by BIN effectively.
In summary, introducing the bio-inspired idea into ICN routing
is a promising solution.
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a typical bio-inspired
method [4], and its classical application is to solve the Travel-
ling Salesman Problem (TSP) [5]. In fact, the situation where
the interest packet (inp) is sent to retrieve the closest content
copy in ICN is similar to that where the traveller wants to
find the shortest path from a source to a destination in TSP;
however, their difference is that an unknown content copy is
retrieved in ICN, while a known destination is found in TSP.
In this way, ants can always find the most suitable content copy
(or the destination) wherever it moves. Therefore, designing an
ACO-inspired ICN routing mechanism to retrieve the closest
content copy by simulating the situation where ACO is used
to solve TSP is feasible.
ICN pays attention to content, and each inp corresponds to a
content (interest) request. The requested content information is
laid over its trail, and the correspondingly accumulated infor-
mation is called the content concentration which is analogous
to the ant pheromones. Furthermore, ICN pays attention to user
interests, and two Content Routers (CRs) with more similar
contents have higher similarity relation. In order to effectively
retrieve the content, the inp usually avoids being forwarded
to the CR which has higher similarity relation with the cur-
rent CR. Accordingly, the similarity relation between two CRs
is analogous to the physical distance between two locations.
In short, the situation where ACO is used to find the shortest
path in TSP depends on pheromone values and distance, while
the situation where ACO is used for ICN routing depends on
content concentration and similarity relation.
Recently, a few related researches have been investigated,
such as [6]–[8]. However, [6] assumes that the content provider
is known, which is against the fact that the location of the
service or content is unknown in ICN routing; [7] forwards
inp to all outgoing interfaces, which reduces the network
performance; and [8] neglects the diversity feature of ant,
which causes the load imbalance. This letter overcomes the
shortcomings of [6]–[8] by considering the continuous content
concentration and similarity relation. The main contribution
of this letter is to propose a new ACO-inspired ICN Rout-
ing mechanism with Content concentration and Similarity
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