CCN - Java opensource kit EmulatoR for wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

The information centric paradigm assumes that the Future Internet will be built around contents rather than host locations. In this direction, the promising Content Centric Networking (CCN) architecture has been conceived to solve the problems of the today Internet by means of a novel way for distributing contents (based on their names) and by adopting distributed caching mechanisms. CCN can be particularly beneficial in an ad hoc networking environments, where the main goal is the delivery of data to a given destination node no matter its position, and moreover, in scenarios characterized by limited connectivity, just as wireless ad hoc networks. Some interesting works, available in literature, propose the exploitation of CCN paradigm in Mobile Ad hoc Networks or Vehicular Ad hoc Networks. Our contribute, here, is to provide the scientific community with a new fully customizable and open source emulation platform, named CCN-Joker, well-suited for wireless devices with limited resources. The rationale of the developed tool entails an application-level overlay. It is composed by several modules interacting with the data structures which a CCN node is commonly made of. We also conduct some preliminary experiments in a small overlay (composed by six EFIKA powerPC boards, equipped by a Wifi external card), analyzing the content distribution process, the hit ratio, and the average download time. These preliminary results confirm the suitability of CCN-Joker to study the CCN performance in Mobile Ad hoc Networks or Vehicular Ad hoc Networks.