Content-Centric Networking Research Articles

MAP-Me: Managing Anchor-Less Producer Mobility in Content-Centric Networks

Mobility has become a basic premise of network communications, thereby requiring a native integration into 5G networks. Despite numerous efforts to propose and standardize effective mobility-management models for IP, the result is a complex, poorly flexible set of mechanisms. The natural support for mobility offered by information centric networking (ICN) makes it a good candidate to define a radically new solution relieving limitations of the traditional approaches. If consumer mobility is supported in ICN by design, in virtue of its connectionless pull-based communication model, producer mobility is still an open challenge. In this paper, we look at two prominent ICN architectures, content centric networking (CCN) and named data networking (NDN) and we propose MAP-Me, an anchor-less solution to manage micro-mobility of content producers via a name-based CCN/NDN data plane, with support for latency-sensitive streaming applications. We analyze MAP-Me performance and provide guarantees of correctness, stability, and bounded stretch, which we verify on real ISP topologies. Finally, we set up a comprehensive simulation environment in NDNSim 2.1 for MAP-Me evaluation and comparison against the existing classes of solutions, including a realistic trace-driven car-mobility pattern under a 802.11n radio access. The results are encouraging and highlight the superiority of MAP-Me in terms of user performance and network cost metrics. All the code is available as open-source.

An In-Network Caching Scheme Based on Energy Efficiency for Content-Centric Networks

Content-centric networking (CCN) has emerged as a promising architecture for future Internet due to its in-network caching capability and the receiver-driven content retrieval paradigm. Recently, the growing energy consumption driven by explosive increase of network traffic has become a key issue in CCN and caused widespread academic concern. In this paper, we construct a model to analyze the energy consumption of content distribution in CCN, and propose an energy efficiency based in-network caching scheme. In this scheme, a judging condition is designed to reduce the total energy consumption of content dissemination, and then in combination with content popularity and node importance, a cache placement strategy is proposed to optimize the selection of caching nodes. Furthermore, a neighbor cooperation-based cache replacement strategy is also proposed, which uses the cache resource of neighbor nodes to increase the chances of content being cached and improve the quality of caching service and resource utilization. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme can outperform the existing schemes in terms of the high cache hit rate, the low average response hops, and the low whole energy consumption.

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.

A collaborative caching strategy in contentcentric networking

Content-centric Networking (CCN) is one of the most promising network architectures for the future Internet. In-network caching is an attractive feature of CCN, however, the existing research does not consider the off-path nodes, or gives a large communication overhead for cooperation, which makes the caching utilization lower, and hard to achieve comprehensive performance optimization. To reduce the data redundancy and improve the caching utilization, we propose a Regional Hashing Collaborative Caching Strategy (RHCCS). According to calculate the importance of nodes in the network topology, we divide the network into the core area and edge area. In core area, we select the relevant nodes for cooperation, store the block in the off-path nodes with the hashing algorithm, and add a new table in original data structures for routing in the collaborative areas. As for edge area, we deploy the on-path reversion scheme. By simulating in ndnSIM and comparing with the basic caching strategy in CCN, experimental results indicate that the RHCCS can effectively reduce data redundancy, routing hops, requesting delay, and significantly increase the hit rate.

Introduction to content centric network architectures replacing traditional location centric network

Nowadays, internet has became most important infrastructure used by the population over the 38.8 billion. The internet is the inseparable from our daily life. The internet based on such location centric communication, however, may induces high risk of network congestion and network service down due to network traffic dominated by contents delivery and multimedia applications. Then, the concept of content centric network (CCN) or information centric network (ICN) has been attracting the attention to resolve the problems under the location based network architecture. This paper explains the overview of the overview of network architectures based on CCN concept in order to help researchers developing well suited next-generation CCN-based network architectures.

Performances of Probabilistic Caching Strategies in Content Centric Networking

Information centric network (ICN) is progressively becoming the revolutionary paradigm to the traditional Internet with improving data (content) distribution on the Internet along with global unique names. Some ICN-based architecture, such as named data network (NDN) and content centric network (CCN) has recently been developed to deal with prominent advantages to implement the basic idea of ICN. To improve the Internet services, its architecture design is shifting from host-centric (end-to-end) communication to receive-driven content retrieval. A prominent advantage of this novel architecture is that networks are equipped with transparent in-network caching to accelerate the content dissemination and improve the utilization of network resources. The gigantic increase of global network traffic poses new challenges to CCN caching technologies. It requires extensive flexibility for consumers to get information. One of the most imperative commonalities of CCN design is ubiquitous caching. It is broadly accepted that the in-network caching would improve the performance. ICN cache receives on several new characteristics: cache is ubiquitous, cache is transparent to application, and content to be cached is more significant. This paper presents a complete survey of state-of-art CCN-based probabilistic caching schemes aiming to address the caching issues, with certain focus on minimizing cache redundancy and improving the accessibility of cached content.

Heuristic Approach to Determining Cache Node Locations in Content-Centric Networks

Internet users consider content information to be useful, but the current Internet approach treats location information as more important as so ties the former to the latter. A Content-Centric Network (CCN) allows the user to obtain content without regard to its location. CCN caches the contents information at its intermediate nodes. The content is searched along the shortest path between the user and the node that has the original content. If any cache node is located on the shortest path, the content can be obtained from the nearest cache node, so far fewer hops are needed compared to the network without any cache node. However, this efficiency is not achieved if no cache node is located on the shortest path. One proposal sets cache nodes that broadcast their contents to surrounding nodes; the user is able to obtain the content from the cache node, rather than the node that has the original content, if the cache node is closer to the user. The location of the cache node affects the number of hops. We formulate an optimization problem that determines the locations of cache nodes to minimize the hop count as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. Since large ILPs cannot be solved in practical time, we introduce a betweenness centrality (BC) approach that determines the location of cache nodes by computing the BC value of each node and ranks the nodes in descending BC order. The BC value denotes the ratio of the number of shortest paths between source-receiver pairs passing through the node to the total number of shortest paths between source-receiver pairs. Simulations show that the BC approach offers drastically reduced computation time, while the average number of hops is just 5.8% higher than that determined with the ILP approach.

TVDR: A Two-Level Virtual Domain Routing Scheme for Content-Centric Networking

In content-centric networking (CCN), the content is retrieved based on its name with the aid of in-network caching, instead of relying on IP address. Since the number of content names is several orders of magnitude higher than that of IP addresses, it presents a significant scalability challenge. Moreover, CCN caches content in every passed router, so multiple identical copies may exist among nearby routers. To address these problems, we propose two-level virtual domain routing (TVDR) utilizing the concept of the virtual domain to reduce FIB entries maintained in the network. To improve cache utilization, we introduce a new caching strategy TVDR-Membership to assign cache capacity. To demonstrate the feasibility of TVDR, We evaluate the TVDR against classical CCN and hash-based routing to assess its feasibility. Results show that TVDR effectively improves scalability and cache utilization and decreases processing delay to fetch contents.

Introduction to content centric network architectures replacing traditional location centric network

Nowadays, internet has became most important infrastructure used by the population over the 38.8 billion. The internet is the inseparable from our daily life. The internet based on such location centric communication, however, may induces high risk of network congestion and network service down due to network traffic dominated by contents delivery and multimedia applications. Then, the concept of content centric network (CCN) or information centric network (ICN) has been attracting the attention to resolve the problems under the location based network architecture. This paper explains the overview of the overview of network architectures based on CCN concept in order to help researchers developing well suited next-generation CCN-based network architectures.

Interest Reduction and PIT Minimization in Content Centric Networks

Content Centric Networking aspires to a more efficient use of the Internet through in-path caching, multi-homing, and provisions for state maintenance and intelligent forwarding at the CCN routers. However, these benefits of CCN’s communication model come at the cost of large Pending Interest Table (PIT) sizes and Interest traffic overhead. Reducing PIT size is essential since larger memory sizes have an associated cost of slower access speeds, which would become a bottleneck in high speed networks. Similarly, Interest traffic may lead to upload capacity getting filled up which would be inefficient as well as problematic in case of traffics having bidirectional data transfers such as video conferencing. Our contribution in this paper is threefold. Firstly, we reduce PIT size by eliminating the need for maintaining PIT entries at all routers. We include the return path in the packets and maintain PIT entries at the egress routers only. Further, we use Persistent Interests (PIs), where one Interest suffices for retrieving multiple data segments, in order to reduce PIT entries at the egress routers as well as to reduce Interest overhead. This is especially useful for live and interactive traffic types where packet sizes are small leading to a large number of pipelined Interests at any given time. Lastly, since using PIs affects CCN’s original transport model, we address the affected aspects, namely congestion and flow control and multi path content retrieval. For our congestion scheme, we show that it achieves max-min fairness.

Robust Caching Control in Crowdsourced Content-Centric Mobile Networking

As the global mobile data traffic grows dramatically in recent years, mobile services are shifting from connection-centric communications to content-centric communications. Content-Centric Networking is a promising clean-slate paradigm with the features of named data and in-network caching. However, the content caching and sharing among mobile clients is not yet considered in Content-Centric Mobile Networking (CCMN). In this paper, to supply a stable high quality of service for content distribution, we design a novel crowdsourced CCMN framework firstly. The vicinal mobile users collaborate with each other by crowdsourcing their caching resources and radio links. Subsequently, we analyze the performance bound of crowdsourced CCMN in perspective of cached data. Furthermore, to guarantee the stability of service quality against user mobility, we propose a robust caching control scheme. We use Kullback-Leibler divergence to characterize user mobility distribution uncertainty and formulate the caching control problem into a chance-constrained robust optimization. By the evaluation results, we can see that the robust caching control mechanism can provide not only a more stable but also higher cache hit ratio than other strategies.

Smart vehicles for urban sensing based on content-centric approach

Today internet of things (IoT) plays a major role in interconnecting physical devices, vehicles, etc. to collect, exchange data through networks. Smart Vehicles collect, store and exchange monitoring sensory content about urban streets. Uploading such monitoring data by all vehicles to the infrastructure is challenging. In-order to avoid such situations, the appropriate vehicles important for different urban sensing tasks is identified by measuring its relative importance in the network. First the different location-aware content is autonomously ranked by a vehicle. It then uses a content importance and its mobility pattern to find its importance in the network. Based on the vehicle's centrality score the best content hubs in the network are identified to provide efficient collect, storage and exchange of sensory data based on content-centric networking (CCN) where content request/response data are characterised. Due to limited bandwidth resources the response data is routed to specified vehicle based on the geo-based routing technique.

Smart vehicles for urban sensing based on content-centric approach

Today internet of things (IoT) plays a major role in interconnecting physical devices, vehicles, etc. to collect, exchange data through networks. Smart Vehicles collect, store and exchange monitoring sensory content about urban streets. Uploading such monitoring data by all vehicles to the infrastructure is challenging. In-order to avoid such situations, the appropriate vehicles important for different urban sensing tasks is identified by measuring its relative importance in the network. First the different location-aware content is autonomously ranked by a vehicle. It then uses a content importance and its mobility pattern to find its importance in the network. Based on the vehicle's centrality score the best content hubs in the network are identified to provide efficient collect, storage and exchange of sensory data based on content-centric networking (CCN) where content request/response data are characterised. Due to limited bandwidth resources the response data is routed to specified vehicle based on the geo-based routing technique.

Secure and DoS‐Resilient Fragment Authentication in CCN‐Based Vehicular Networks

Content‐Centric Networking (CCN) is considered as a promising alternative to traditional IP‐based networking for vehicle‐to‐everything communication environments. In general, CCN packets must be fragmented and reassembled based on the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) size of the content delivery path. It is thus challenging to securely protect fragmented packets against attackers who intentionally inject malicious fragments to disrupt normal services on CCN‐based vehicular networks. This paper presents a new secure content fragmentation method that is resistant to Denial‐of‐Service (DoS) attacks in CCN‐based vehicular networks. Our approach guarantees the authenticity of each fragment through the immediate fragment verification at interim nodes on the routing path. Our experiment results demonstrate that the proposed approach provides much stronger security than the existing approach named FIGOA, without imposing a significant overhead in the process. The proposed method achieves a high immediate verification probability of 98.2% on average, which is 52% higher than that of FIGOA, while requiring only 14% more fragments than FIGOA.

Performance Analysis of Content-Centric Networking on an Arbitrary Network Topology

Performance Analysis of Content-Centric Networking on an Arbitrary Network Topology

Secure and Efficient Content Distribution in Crowdsourced Vehicular Content-Centric Networking

In future intelligent transportation systems, a large amount of content needs to be efficiently and securely exchanged between vehicles and roadside units via vehicular networks to improve the driving and traveling experience. To solve the challenges caused by poor-quality wireless links and the mobility of vehicles, vehicular content-centric networking (VCCN) emerges as a promising paradigm, which has a better content distribution efficiency, mobility, and security via named data and in-networking caching compared with an IP-based network. However, providing a high-quality experience for content distribution in VCCN is challenging due to the dynamic network topologies, varying wireless channel conditions, and vehicle user privacy. In this paper, we propose a novel crowdsourced VCCN framework for secure and efficient content distribution. This framework enables the nearby vehicles to crowdsource their caching resources and radio links for cooperative content distribution. We formulate the problem as the maximization of all users’ payoff and propose an online scheduling method to solve this solution. Furthermore, we adopt identity-based proxy reencryption and named function networking to secure the process of content distribution. The simulation results show that our proposals improve the performance of VCCN in terms of average requester utility compared with original CCN forwarding strategies.

Content-Centric Networking Management Based on Software Defined Networks: Survey

Content-centric networks (CCNs) have received a lot of interest as one of the major innovative future Internet paradigms. The CCN key feature is built around the named content which can be requested, replayed, routed by name, and stored through in-network caching. Software defined networking (SDN) represents a new concept that can leverage the research and innovation enabling migration to future Internet. This stream of thought can be explored through certain research projects. In this survey, we present the basic concept of each paradigm. We introduce a thorough description of CCN mechanisms as well as their related studies. Therefore, we highlight the benefit of combining CCN networks with SDN and OpenFlow. Then, we analyze some of the most prominent approaches combining the CCN and the OpenFlow.

Big data analytics for mitigating broadcast storm in Vehicular Content Centric networks

The focus of the research for big data analytics for sustainability (BDAS) is Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs), since it has become the most popular technology for the researchers, academia and the organizations. However, in VANETs most part of the time a well-defined path from a consumer to the provider does not exist due to the intermittent connectivity and mobility. Hence, Vehicular Content Centric Networks (VCCNs) has been proposed and has emerged as a future Internet technology. The focus of the VCCNs is to retrieve and distribute the content faster than the existing Internet architecture in vehicular environment. In VCCNs, the consumer broadcasts the interest packet to the provider, including the name of the required content. If the provider is available at one hop neighbour, the interest packet is sent to the provider. The provider generates the data packet and sends back to the consumer. Otherwise, the neighbour vehicle becomes the forwarder vehicle who receives the interest packet from the consumer and searches in its cache called Content Storage (CS). If the content is not available in its storage, the forwarder vehicle rebroadcasts the interest packet within its vicinity forwards the interest packet to the provider. The provider generates the data packet including the content and sends back to the consumer through the selected forwarder vehicle. The VCCNs communication paradigm faces several challenges i.e., mobility, interest broadcast storm, routing, interest or data packet forwarding and forwarder selection. Various routing protocols have already been proposed and implemented in order to resolve the existing problems. However, due to the high mobility and the dynamic network topology in vehicular environment, there is no assurance that the back path is still available followed by the interest message which causes disconnected link problem. Hence, the retrieval of the required data might be effected. Thus, the aim of this paper is to propose a forwarding protocol to mitigating the interest broadcast storm and the disconnected link problems, keeping in the view of intermittent connectivity and high mobility that will improve the data delivery probability, packet loss ratio, Interest Satisfaction Ratio (ISR) and average End-to-End delay in a highway and an urban scenario of a vehicular environment. Results and demonstrations show that the proposed protocol meets all the requirements for BDAS.

A Privacy Preserving Strategy Based on Anonymous Group in Content Centric Network

In Content Centric Networking (CCN), “publish-request-response” is presented in data communications between users and publishers, as well as the response message could be cacheable in the routing node. Based on this model, privacy disclosure is a threat to users and publishers. In this paper, a strategy for CNN privacy information protection is proposed. This system adopts hybrid encryption method which can take advantage of nodes ubiquitous cache in CCN. At the same time, it ensures fewer numbers of symmetric keys, which can minimize cache overhead. In addition, this paper puts forward the construction of anonymous group, which can hide the real signer and protect the identity of it.