Failure-Aware Protection for Many-to-Many Routing in Content Centric Networks

Abstract

Network communications can easily be disrupted by the failure of networking equipment, ranging from a single accidental link cut, to a wide swath of links and nodes wiped out simultaneously by a natural disaster. To mitigate the impact of these failures, survivability solutions involving precomputed backup paths can be used to help maintain connectivity and reduce service downtime. Further improvements to reliability can be gained through the use of on-path caching inherent in Content Centric Networking (CCN). CCN is an alternative networking paradigm that puts the focus on efficiently providing consumers access over the network to content held by producers. As content is returned from a producer, it can be cached at the intermediate routers, allowing that content to be replicated and forwarded out to all known consumers asking for that content. We aim to improve the reliability of CCN by proposing routing algorithms for connecting many consumers to a set of producers with paths that are survivable in respect to a flexibly-sized failure set. These survivable routes are enhanced through the use of failure aware on-path caching that allows consumers to access content even after the primary connections to producers are severed.