Reassessing caching performance in information-centric IoT

The performance of in-network caches has traditionally been evaluated using well-understood metrics such as the cache hit rate. This extends to the field of Information-Centric Networking (ICN), where caching strategies are evaluated in the same way. In this paper, we argue that in the subdomain of information-centric Internet of Things (IoT), these traditional metrics are not sufficient to describe caching performance. Using a series of experiments on real hardware as a demonstration, we show the shortcomings of the cache hit rate metric and introduce the two new metrics cache access factor and cache latency factor that provide deeper insights into the effectiveness of in-network caching strategies.