In recent years, the increasing demand for media-rich content has driven many efforts to redesign the Internet architecture. As one of the main candidates, information-centric network (ICN) has attracted significant attention, where in-network cache is a key component in different ICN architectures. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for optimal cache management in ICNs that jointly considers caching strategy and content routing. Specifically, our framework is based on software-defined networking (SDN) where a controller is responsible for determining the optimal caching strategy and content routing via linear network coding (LNC). For the proposed cache management framework, we first formulate an optimization problem to minimize the network bandwidth cost and cache cost by jointly considering caching strategy and content routing with LNC. We then develop an efficient network coding based cache management (NCCM) algorithm to obtain a near-optimal caching and routing solution for ICNs. We further derive the upper and lower bounds of the problem and conduct extensive experiments to compare the performance of the NCCM algorithm with these bounds. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the NCCM algorithm and the framework.
