Content-centric Networking Architecture Research Articles

SDN-Enabled Content Dissemination Scheme for the Internet of Vehicles

The content-centric networking (CCN) architecture allows access to the content through name, instead of the physical location where the content is stored, which makes it a more robust and flexible content-based architecture. Nevertheless, in CCN, the broadcast nature of vehicles on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) results in latency and network congestion. The IoV-based content distribution is an emerging concept in which all the vehicles are connected via the internet. Due to the high mobility of vehicles, however, IoV applications have different network requirements that differ from those of many other networks, posing new challenges. Considering this, a novel strategy mediator framework is presented in this paper for managing the network resources efficiently. Software-defined network (SDN) controller is deployed for improving the routing flexibility and facilitating in the inter-interoperability of heterogeneous devices within the network. Due to the limited memory of edge devices, the delectable bloom filters are used for caching and storage. Finally, the proposed scheme is compared with the existing variants for validating its effectiveness.

Integration of ICN and MEC in 5G and Beyond Networks: Mutual Benefits, Use Cases, Challenges, Standardization, and Future Research

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is a novel edge computing paradigm that moves cloud-based processing and storage capabilities closer to the mobile users by implementing server resources in the access nodes. MEC helps fulfill the stringent requirements of 5G and beyond networks to offer anytime-anywhere connectivity for many devices with ultra-low delay and huge bandwidths. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is another prominent network technology that builds on a content-centric network architecture to overcome host-centric routing/operation shortcomings and to realize efficient pervasive and ubiquitous networking. It is envisaged to be employed in Future Internet including Beyond 5G (B5G) networks. The consolidation of ICN with MEC technology offers new opportunities to realize that vision and serve advanced use cases. However, various integration challenges are yet to be addressed to enable the wide-scale co-deployment of ICN with MEC in future networks. In this paper, we discuss and elaborate on ICN MEC integration to provide a comprehensive survey with a forward-looking perspective for Beyond 5G networks. In that regard, we deduce lessons learned from related works (for both 5G and Beyond 5G networks). We present ongoing standardization activities to highlight practical implications of such efforts. Moreover, we render key B5G use cases and highlight the role for ICN MEC integration for addressing their requirements. Finally, we layout research challenges and identify potential research directions. For this last contribution, we also provide a mapping of the latter to ICN integration challenges and use cases.

Software-Defined Content Dissemination Scheme for Internet of Healthcare Vehicles in COVID-Like Scenarios

The exponential increase in the number of connected devices in the network led to a paradigm shift from the traditional host-centric IP-based network architecture to a content-based paradigm, which eliminates the address-content bindings in traditional IP-based architectures. In content-centric networking (CCN) architecture, contents are accessed by name rather than the physical location where these are stored, which results in more flexible and robust content-based architecture. However, the broadcast nature of devices in CCN causes network congestion and latency. The Internet of Healthcare Vehicles (IoHV) is an evolving paradigm that relies on smart transportation involving ambulances and other healthcare vehicles (for rapid COVID testing) to connect with each other through the Internet, especially in case like COVID 19 testing and contact tracing. However, the applications of IoHV are not similar to other networks and therefore bring new technical challenges due to high mobility and rapid changes of topology. Therefore, to handle these challenges, in this article, we propose a novel scheme that finds an optimal path. Using the optimal path, the interest packet is forwarded among healthcare vehicles in a smart city scenario. The proposed scheme maximizes the probability of finding the requested data while minimizing latency. As the proposed scheme does not involve broadcasting of interest packets, the problem of network congestion in CCN can be solved to a large extent. In order to facilitate the interoperability of heterogeneous healthcare devices in the network, and to improve the routing flexibility, an SDN controller is deployed in the IoHV scenario. It maintains the global information of the network in its flow tables. Moreover, to achieve faster response time and lower latency in the IoHV environment, edge devices are utilized instead of central cloud. Keeping in view the memory constraints of edge devices, deletable Bloom filters are used for storage and caching. Finally, the open issues and challenges related to the proposed solution for the IoHV scenario are also presented.

Hierarchical cooperative-peers fog caching strategy to improve the performance of content centric networking

Content Centric Networking (CCN) is a novel paradigm to address challenges faced by traditional TCP/IP architecture. The motivation behind CCN is its inherent feature of caching. Caching at intermediate nodes is essential to reduce delay and to enhance performance of the network. However, determining as to how and where content should be cached to achieve this is the major challenge in CCN architecture. In this paper, we have proposed a Hierarchical Cooperative-peers Architecture (HCPA) and effective caching approaches to reduce the response time and increase the cache hit rate alleviating the server bottleneck and network traffic. The main idea is to utilize the resources of fog peer nodes near the user to deal with high latency and low bandwidth issues of the current communication pattern. This is achieved by pooling the cache space of cooperative fog peers of a region with a Regional demand-based fog Caching (RDFC) approach in two folds. First implementation is with replicated caching (RC) and the second one is using unique caching (UC). Both these approaches are implemented using CcnSim and the performance is evaluated based on cache hit rate, response time and bandwidth usage which has shown the significant improvement in the performance of the network.

Convergence of ICN and MEC for 5G: Opportunities and Challenges

Information-centric networking (ICN) builds on a content-centric network architecture to overcome the shortcomings of host-centric routing/operation and realize efficient pervasive and ubiquitous networking. Similarly, multi-access edge computing (MEC) is another key technology to fulfill the stringent requirements of 5G to offer anytime-anywhere connected services for massive numbers of devices with ultra-low delay and very large bandwidths. The amalgamation of the ICN paradigm with MEC opens up new opportunities as well some challenges to realize 5G vision and advance beyond 5G systems. The key motivation of this article is to discuss and elaborate the convergence of ICN and MEC for better future networks, and to identify the current standardization efforts. Moreover, the article renders the key use cases and identifies potential research directions with the coexistence of ICN and MEC.

A collaborative caching strategy for content-centric enabled wireless sensor networks

The Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an efficient traffic handling technology by accessing content with its name instead of its physical location and achieving in-network caching. Indeed, CCN caching ensures high content availability, network traffic reduction, and low retrieval latency which reduces congestion and improves end-to-end delay. Moreover, it could greatly improve the efficiency of content delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In this article, we propose to exploit this feature to enable CCN in WSN environments. The CCN architecture enables the content caching on each sensor-node in WSN and several research studies have been devoted to the caching management issue in such a context. However, caching the content on all the nodes is not a good strategy in terms of resource utilization. It is, therefore, necessary to determine where to cache and how to handle it in order to optimize the resources while realizing a high-interest satisfaction rate. Thus, our objective is to study existing caching strategies and propose a novel one that takes into account the node centrality and its distance from the source of the content. Through extensive simulations, we examine the performance of our scheme under different configurations and demonstrate how it outperforms the traditional caching strategies such as LCE (Leave Copy Everywhere) and LCD (Leave Copy Down).

Efficient Caching for Data-Driven IoT Applications and Fast Content Delivery with Low Latency in ICN

Edge computing is a key paradigm for the various data-intensive Internet of Things (IoT) applications where caching plays a significant role at the edge of the network. This paradigm provides data-intensive services, computational activities, and application services to the proximity devices and end-users for fast content retrieval with a very low response time that fulfills the ultra-low latency goal of the 5G networks. Information-centric networking (ICN) is being acknowledged as an important technology for the fast content retrieval of multimedia content and content-based IoT applications. The main goal of ICN is to change the current location-dependent IP network architecture to location-independent and content-centric network architecture. ICN can fulfill the needs for caching to the vicinity of the edge devices without further storage deployment. In this paper, we propose an architecture for efficient caching at the edge devices for data-intensive IoT applications and a fast content access mechanism based on new clustering and caching procedures in ICN. The proposed cluster-based efficient caching mechanism provides the solution to the problem of the existing hash and on-path caching mechanisms, and the proposed content popularity mechanism increases the content availability at the proximity devices for reducing the content transfer time and packet loss ratio. We also provide the simulation results and mathematical analysis to prove that the proposed mechanism is better than other state-of-the-art caching mechanisms and the overall network efficiencies are increased.

A survey of applications research on content-centric networking

As a named data-based clean-slate future Internet architecture, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) uses entirely different protocols and communication patterns from the host-to-host IP network. In CCN, communication is wholly driven by the data consumer. Consumers must send Interest packets with the content name and not by the host's network address. Its nature of in-network caching, Interest packets aggregation and hop-by-hop communication poses unique challenges to provision of Internet applications, where traditional IP network no long works well. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art application research activities related to CCN architecture. Our main aims in this survey are (a) to identify the advantages and drawbacks of CCN architectures for application provisioning; (b) to discuss the challenges and opportunities regarding service provisioning in CCN architectures; and (c) to further encourage deeper thinking about design principles for future Internet architectures from the perspective of upper-layer applications.

Proactive Caching Placement for Arbitrary Topology With Multi-Hop Forwarding in ICN

With the rapid growth of network traffic and the enhancement of the quality of experiences of users, Information-Centric Networking (ICN), which is a content-centric network architecture with named data caching and routing, is proposed to improve the multimedia content distribution efficiency. In arbitrary topology, cache nodes and users are randomly distributed and connected, hence it is challenging to achieve an optimal caching placement under this situation. In this paper, we propose a caching placement algorithm for arbitrary topology in ICN. We formulate an optimization problem of proactive caching placement for arbitrary topology combined with multi-hop forwarding, with an objective to optimize the user delay and the load balancing level of the nodes simultaneously. Since the original problem is NP-hard, we solve the formulated caching placement problem in two sub-problems, content replica allocation sub-problem and content replica placement sub-problem. First, in the content replica allocation sub-problem, the replica number of each content is obtained by utilizing the auction theory. Second, the replica number of each content is used as a constraint for the content replica placement sub-problem, which is solved by matching theory. The caching placement algorithm combined with multi-hop NRR forwarding maximizes the utilization of cache resources in order to achieve better caching performance. The numerical results show that significant hop count savings and load balancing level improvement are attainable via the proposed algorithm.

Network-Coding Approach for Information-Centric Networking

The current internet architecture is inefficient in fulfilling the demands of newly emerging internet applications. To address this issue, several over-the-top application-level solutions have been employed, making the overall architecture very complex. Information-centric-networking (ICN) architecture has emerged as a promising alternative solution. The ICN architecture decouples the content from the host at the network level and supports the temporary storage of content in an in-network cache. Fundamentally, the ICN can be considered a multisource, multicast content-delivery solution. Because of the benefits of network coding in multicasting scenarios and proven benefits in distributed storage networks, the network coding is apt for the ICN architecture. In this study, we propose a solvable linear network-coding scheme for the ICN architecture. We also propose a practical implementation of the network-coding scheme for the ICN, particularly for the content-centric network (CCN) architecture, which is termed the coded CCN. The performance results show that the network-coding scheme improves the performance of the CCN and significantly reduces the network traffic and average download delay.

Content sharing with mobility in an infrastructure-less environment

Current networking technologies are ill-suited for content sharing in emerging military and first-responder networks where fixed infrastructures and stable connectivity cannot be assumed. New paradigms, in particular content-based networking, is proving to be a viable solution for operation in mobile infrastructure-less environments where intermittent and disrupted connectivity is normal. This paper presents CASCADE, a content-centric networking architecture that facilitates generation and dissemination of content in challenging “edge” environments. CASCADE is implemented in Android and has been subjected to thorough performance evaluation using both ad hoc Wi-Fi technology as well as military tactical radios. This paper discusses architectural approaches and decisions, and offers insights and lessons learned over the course of the project.

On the urgency of implementing Interest NACK into CCN: from the perspective of countering advanced interest flooding attacks

Content centric networking (CCN) where content/named data as the first entity has become one of the most promising architectures for the future Internet. To achieve better security, the Interest NACK mechanism is introduced into CCN; however, it has not attracted enough attention and most of the CCN architectures do not embed Interest NACK until now. This study focuses on analysing the urgency of implementing Interest NACK into CCN, by designing a novel network threat named advanced interest flooding attack (AIFA) to attack CCN, which can not only exhaust the pending interest table (PIT) resource of each involved router just as normal interest flooding attack (IFA), but also keep each PIT entry unexpired until it finishes, making it harder to detect and more harmful when compared with the normal IFA. Specifically, the damage of AIFA on CCN architecture with and without Interest NACK is evaluated and analysed, compared with normal IFA, and then the urgency of implementing Interest NACK is highlighted.

PPP: Prefix-Based Popularity Prediction for Efficient Content Caching in Contentcentric Networks

In the Content-Centric Networking (CCN) architecture, popular content can be cached in some intermediate network devices while being delivered, and the following requests for the cached content can be efficiently handled by the caches. Thus, how to design in-network caching is important for reducing both the traffic load and the delivery delay. In this paper, we propose a caching framework of Prefix-based Popularity Prediction (PPP) for efficient caching in CCN. PPP assigns a lifetime (in a cache) to the prefix of a name (of each cached object) based on its access history (or popularity), which is represented as a Prefix-Tree (PT). We demonstrate PPP’s predictability of content popularity in CCN by both traces and simulations. The evaluation results show that PPP can achieve higher cache hits and less traffic load than traditional caching algorithms (i.e., LRU and LFU). Also, its performance gain increases with users of high mobility.

Designing Privacy-Preserving Protocols for Content Sharing and Aggregation in Content Centric Networking

In the content-centric networking (CCN), the content transmitted between data owners, consumers, and the servers is confidential to its publishers. Therefore, the content’s publishers are sensitive to publication of their content to unauthorized consumers and third party service providers. Access control-based mechanisms have been efficient solutions to address this challenge where the content can be accessed by legitimate consumers only. However, the main limitation with an access control-based solution is that the content itself and the user interests are made public to certain parties in the system. Moreover, the solutions based on access control mechanism are limited within only sharing the content among various publishers and consumers where on the contrary, the secure aggregation of content in CCN is yet to be explored. To address these issues, we describe possible cryptographic solutions for content privacy in CCN, which can share and aggregate the content securely. More specifically, we propose two cryptographic protocols for content sharing and aggregation: 1) cryptographic protocol to exchange the encrypted content (CPE2C) and 2) privacy-preserving aggregation over distributed content (PDAC). The CPE2C protocol is simple yet highly secure against intruders or collusion attacks. This protocol is useful in terms of exchanging sensitive content between a publisher and a consumer. The PDAC is effective for distributed, secure, and energy-efficient content aggregation in smart IoT systems leveraging the CCN architecture and cloud services. The privacy analysis and performance results show that the proposed cryptographic protocols perform efficiently without disclosing any private information.

ECCN: an extended CCN architecture to improve data access in vehicular content-centric network

Content-centric network (CCN) has been considered for VANETs, due to its scalability, flexibility and security. In this paper, an extended CCN architecture is proposed to reduce critical data access time in vehicular content centric networks by storing them in the number of vehicles around the source. The critical data include sensitive data such as accidents, traffic that require quick and reliable access. The aim is to reduce access time for this type of data in the discovery phase. Each vehicle stores or updates critical data in cooperation with other vehicles in the preparation phase. During the preparation phase, the critical data spread around the source by a combination of physical movement and radio propagation. This gives the requesting vehicle a better chance to find the data in a few hops, with minimal network overhead and lower delay, during the discovery phase. The efficiency of this architecture is evaluated by simulation and shown that interest packet delay and number of duplicated data packets are generally lower than the existing methods.

향상된 보안 및 적용 가능성을 위한 컨텐츠 중심 네트워킹(CCN)의 새로운 아키텍처 연구

Information Centric Networking is changing the way how content is being transmitted. The shift from IP and host based networking towards content based networking scenario is growing day by day. Many researches have been done about different frameworks of ICN. Caching is an important part of ICN and many researchers have also proposed different ways for caching the data. With caching of data in intermediate devices like the network devices as well the user devices in some cases, the issue of content security as well as the role of the content producer becomes a major concern. A modified ICN architecture based on the current Content Centric Networking (CCN) model is presented in the paper. The architecture mainly focuses on involving the content producer in content delivery in the real time. The proposed architecture provides better security aspects for the CCN architecture. Apart from security the paper will also consider the issue of applicability of CCN architecture to replace the TCP/IP based architecture. The efficiency of the proposed architecture is compared with the previous CCN architecture based on the response time for a content delivery which shows very comparable level of efficiency. The paper than analyzes different beneficial aspects of the proposed architecture over the current architecture.

Enabling Tunneling in CCN

Content-centric networking (CCN) is a new networking architecture that adopts a receiver-driven transport design with pervasive in-network cache support, which precisely meets the present Internet usage pattern. However, present CCN design lacks support for tunneling, which is proved to be an important feature that simplifies the addition of new network functionality to the network and eases the network architecture evolution. In this letter, we propose a mechanism to add tunneling capability to the CCN with full compatibility with CCN’s naming convention and forwarding logic. We show that the proposed tunneling mechanism not only works, but also largely inherits the performance benefits introduced by the CCN architecture.

Big data in mobile social networks: a QoE-oriented framework

Due to the rapid development of mobile social networks, mobile big data play an important role in providing mobile social users with various mobile services. However, as mobile big data have inherent properties, current MSNs face a challenge to provide mobile social user with a satisfactory quality of experience. Therefore, in this article, we propose a novel framework to deliver mobile big data over content- centric mobile social networks. At first, the characteristics and challenges of mobile big data are studied. Then the content-centric network architecture to deliver mobile big data in MSNs is presented, where each datum consists of interest packets and data packets, respectively. Next, how to select the agent node to forward interest packets and the relay node to transmit data packets are given by defining priorities of interest packets and data packets. Finally, simulation results show the performance of our framework with varied parameters.

콘텐트 중심 네트워크에서 정규표현식을 활용한 캐시친화적인 적응형 스트리밍 프레임워크

인터넷을 이용하는 사용자의 관점이 호스트 중심에서 콘텐트 중심으로 변화하면서 콘텐트 중심 네트워크 (Content Centric Network, 이하 CCN)라는 새로운 패러다임이 소개되었다. 한편, 최근 비디오 스트리밍에 대한 수요가 급증하고 있으며 더 높은 사용자의 만족도를 위한 적응형 스트리밍이 소개되면서 많은 연구가 진행 중에 있다. 따라서 CCN에서도 사용자의 수요에 따라 적응형 스트리밍을 고려할 필요성이 있다. 하지만 CCN에서 기존의 네트워크 구조에서와 동일한 방식으로 적응형 비디오 스트리밍 서비스를 할 경우 CCN 라우터 내 캐시를 (CS) 충분히 활용하지 못한다는 한계점이 있으며 또한 단말의 달라지는 요구 사항을 캐시 활용에 반영할 수 없는 문제점도 있다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 정규표현식을 활용한 콘텐트 네이밍 방식을 적용하여 기존 적응형 스트리밍 비트레이트 선택 알고리즘의 캐시활용도를 높이면서도 CCN의 기본 프로토콜에 적합한 프레임워크를 제시하고, 단말의 상태에 따라 동적인 표현식 기술 전략 및 선택 알고리즘을 통하여 비디오 스트리밍 품질을 개선하고자 한다. Content Centric Network (CCN) has been introduced as a new paradigm due to a shift of users's perspective of using Internet from host-centric to content-centric. On the other hand, a demand for video streaming has been increasing. Thus, Adaptive streaming has been introduced and researched for achieving higher user's satisfaction. If an architecture of Internet is replaced with CCN architecture, it is necessary to consider adaptive video streaming in CCN according to the demand of users. However, if the same rate decision algorithm used in Internet is deployed in CCN, there are a limitation of utilizing content store (CS) in CCN router and a problem of reflecting dynamic requirements. Therefore, this paper presents a framework adequate to CCN protocol and cache utilization, adapting content naming method of exploiting regular expression to the rate decision algorithm of the existing adaptive streaming. In addition, it also improves the quality of video streaming and verifies the performance through dynamic expression strategies and selection algorithm of the strategies.

Mobility support for content source in content-centric networking

Content-centric networking (CCN) is rising to solve the problems suffered by traditional networks, especially in terms of content delivery. One of the critical issues for basic CCN is supporting mobility. Handoff of Mobile Content Source (MCS) will result in a large scale routing update, which generates huge amount of routing overhead and leads to service interruption. Most of the existing CCN mobility mechanisms are transplanted from the IP mobility solutions, which are unnaturally integrated with CCN. Different from previous works, a mobility strategy from the perspective of CCN architecture is proposed to support the handoff of MCS in this paper. Especially, we define the critical network routers that can limit the routing update scale effectively when MCS handoff is conducted. Based on the defined critical network routers, the proposed scheme can provide lower routing update overhead, faster routing convergence and shorter service interruption time. Finally, series of simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.