The rapid development in wireless technologies and multimedia services has radically shifted the major function of the current Internet from host-centric communication to service-oriented content dissemination, resulting a mismatch between the protocol design and the current usage patterns. Motivated by this significant change, Information-Centric Networking (ICN), which has been attracting ever-increasing attention from the communication networks research community, has emerged as a new clean-slate networking paradigm for future Internet. Through identifying and routing data by unified names, ICN aims at providing natural support for efficient information retrieval over the Internet. As a crucial characteristic of ICN, in-network caching enables users to efficiently access popular contents from on-path routers equipped with ubiquitous caches, leading to the enhancement of the service quality and reduction of network loads. Performance analysis and optimisation has been and continues to be key research interests of ICN. This thesis focuses on the development of efficient and accurate analytical models for the performance evaluation of ICN caching and the design of optimal caching management schemes under practical network configurations. This research starts with the proposition of a new analytical model for caching performance under the bursty multimedia traffic. The bursty characteristic is captured and the closed formulas for cache hit ratio are derived. To investigate the impact of topology and heterogeneous caching parameters on the performance, a comprehensive analytical model is developed to gain valuable insight into the caching performance with heterogeneous cache sizes, service intensity and content distribution under arbitrary topology. The accuracy of the proposed models is validated by comparing the analytical results with those obtained from extensive simulation experiments. The analytical models are then used as cost-efficient tools to investigate the key network and content parameters on the performance of caching in ICN. Bursty traffic and heterogeneous caching features have significant influence on the performance of ICN. Therefore, in order to obtain optimal performance results, a caching resource allocation scheme, which leverages the proposed model and targets at minimising the total traffic within the network and improving hit probability at the nodes, is proposed. The performance results reveal that the caching allocation scheme can achieve better caching performance and network resource utilisation than the default homogeneous and random caching allocation strategy. To attain a thorough understanding of the trade-off between the economic aspect and service quality, a cost-aware Quality-of-Service (QoS) optimisation caching mechanism is further designed aiming for cost-efficiency and QoS guarantee in ICN. A cost model is proposed to take into account installation and operation cost of ICN under a realistic ISP network scenario, and a QoS model is presented to formulate the service delay and delay jitter in the presence of heterogeneous service requirements and general probabilistic caching strategy. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism in achieving better service quality and lower network cost. In this thesis, the proposed analytical models are used to efficiently and accurately evaluate the performance of ICN and investigate the key performance metrics. Leveraging the insights discovered by the analytical models, the proposed caching management schemes are able to optimise and enhance the performance of ICN. To widen the outcomes achieved in the thesis, several interesting yet challenging research directions are pointed out.

Le caching de réseau peut aider àgérer l'explosion du trafic sur Internet et àsatisfaire la Qualité d'Expérience (QoE)croissante demandée par les usagers.Néanmoins, les techniques proposées jusqu'àprésent par la littérature scientifique n'arriventpas à exploiter tous les avantages potentiels. Lestravaux de recherche précédents cherchent àoptimiser le hit ratio ou d'autres métriques deréseau, tandis que les opérateurs de réseau(ISPs) sont plus intéressés à des métriques plusconcrètes, par exemple le coût et la qualitéd'expérience (QoE). Pour cela, nous visonsdirectement l'optimisation des métriquesconcrètes et montrons que, ce faisant, on obtientdes meilleures performances.Plus en détail, d'abord nous proposons desnouvelles techniques de caching pour réduire lecoût pour les ISPs en préférant stocker lesobjets qui sont les plus chères à repérer.Nous montrons qu'un compromis existe entre lamaximisation classique du hit ratio et laréduction du coût.Ensuite, nous étudions la distribution vidéo,comme elle est la plus sensible à la QoE etconstitue la plus part du trafic Internet. Lestechniques de caching classiques ignorent sescaractéristiques particulières, par exemple le faitqu'une vidéo est représentée par différentesreprésentations, encodées en différents bit-rateset résolutions. Nous introduisons des techniquesqui prennent en compte cela.Enfin, nous remarquons que les techniquescourantes assument la connaissance parfaite desobjets qui traversent le réseau. Toutefois, laplupart du trafic est chiffrée et du coup toutetechnique de caching ne peut pas fonctionner.Nous proposons un mécanisme qui permet auxISPs de faire du caching, bien qu’ils ne puissentobserver les objets envoyés. / Network caching can help copewith today Internet traffic explosion and sustainthe demand for an increasing user Quality ofExperience. Nonetheless, the techniquesproposed in the literature do not exploit all thepotential benefits. Indeed, they usually aim tooptimize hit ratio or other network-centricmetrics, e.g. path length, latency, etc., whilenetwork operators are more focused on moremore practical metrics, like cost and quality ofexperience. We devise caching techniques thatdirectly target the latter objectives and showthat this allows to gain better performance.More specifically, we first propose novelstrategies that reduce the Internet ServiceProvider (ISP) operational cost, bypreferentially caching the objects whose cost ofretrieval is the largest.We then focus on video delivery, since it is themost sensitive to QoE and represents most ofthe Internet traffic. Classic techniques ignorethat each video is represented by differentrepresentations, encoded at different bit-ratesand resolutions. We devise techniques that takethis into account.Finally, we point out that the techniquespresented in the literature assume the perfectknowledge of the objects that are crossing thenetwork. Nonetheless, most of the traffic todayis encrypted and thus caching techniques areinapplicable. To overcome this limit, Wepropose a mechanism which allows the ISPs tocache, even without knowing the objects being

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