Information-centric Networking Features Research Articles

Distance-based dynamic caching and replacement strategy in NDN-IoT networks

The amount of data on the Internet has risen noticeably due to the exponential increase in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Recently, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is acknowledged as a suitable framework for creating IoT network protocols. One notable feature of ICN is in-network caching, which stores the data packets on intermediate routers/nodes that can be accessed by the subscribers when required. This work proposes a novel Distance-based dynamic caching and replacement strategy (DBDCRS) which involves a light weight calculation that utilizes the request aggregation to find the request weight of the requests stored in Pending interest table (PIT) and node weight of a node based on the distance from the subscriber and IoT publisher to accomplish the caching decision. To eliminate the data redundancy, the scheme caches a particular content on a single node along the specific interest-data path. Additionally, a custom cache replacement policy is introduced which retains the essential contents in cache. Simulation results show that our proposed DBDCRS scheme outperform other in-network cache placement schemes in terms of cache hit ratio, server hit reduction ratio, average response latency, and energy consumption.

Caching Method for Information-Centric Ad Hoc Networks Based on Content Popularity and Node Centrality

In recent years, most internet communications have focused on accessing content such as video, web services, and audio. Conversely, traditional Internet communications are inefficient because they are primarily designed for data transfer between hosts. In response, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has emerged as a content-oriented networking model. The impact of ICN in reducing the location dependency of data and its high compatibility with ad hoc networks has led to research on realizing Information-Centric ad hoc Networks (ICANET). There has also been extensive research into caching content in the network, which is one of the features of ICN. In static networks, methods have been proposed to cache highly popular content in nodes that are more likely to be used for shortest paths. However, in dynamic networks, content with high popularity should be cached on nodes that are more likely to reach all nodes, as missing nodes need to be taken into account. In this study, we propose a cache control scheme for content caching in ICANET that utilizes both content popularity and the closeness centrality of nodes within the ad hoc network as indicators. To realise the proposed method, a new packet flow based on the Pending Interest Table (PIT) and Content Store (CS) was implemented in the forwarding strategy of ICN. The experiments used ndnSIM, a protocol implementation of NDN based on Network Simulator3, which is widely used in wireless network research. The experimental results showed that the cache hit rate could be increased by up to 4.5% in situations with low content bias. In the same situation, the response delay was also reduced by up to 28.3%.

ICN-Based Enhanced Content Delivery for CDN

With the rapid growth of internet traffic, the traditional host-to-host TCP/IP architecture is subject to many service limitations faced with content-oriented applications. Various novel network architectures have been proposed to solve these limitations, among which Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is one of the most prominent. ICN features the decoupling of content (service) from the physical devices storing (providing) it through location-independent naming, and offers inherent enhancement to network performance, such as multicast and in-network caching. ICN in-network caching has been extensively studied, and we believe that it may also be the main incentive for ISPs to deploy ICN. A CDN (content delivery network) is a typical content-oriented network paradigm that aims to provide the fast delivery of content. In this paper, we leverage the advantages of the in-network caching of ICN to enhance the content delivery efficiency of CDN by integrating ICN as a service. First, we present our design of a content delivery network enhanced with ICN, called IECDN. Additionally, we formulate a mathematical model to optimize the performance of our proposed design and conduct a series of evaluations. The results indicate that our proposed design provides significant performance gains while reducing bandwidth consumption and shows better resilience to traffic surge.

Blockchain-Enabled On-Path Caching for Efficient and Reliable Content Delivery in Information-Centric Networks

As the demand for online content continues to grow, traditional Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) are facing significant challenges in terms of scalability and performance. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promising new approach to content delivery that aims to address these issues by placing content at the center of the network architecture. One of the key features of ICNs is on-path caching, which allows content to be cached at intermediate routers along the path from the source to the destination. On-path caching in ICNs still faces some challenges, such as the scalability of the cache and the management of cache consistency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes several alternative caching schemes that can be integrated into ICNs using blockchain technology. These schemes include Bloom filters, content-based routing, and hybrid caching, which combine the advantages of off-path and on-path cachings. The proposed blockchain-enabled on-path caching mechanism ensures the integrity and authenticity of cached content, and smart contracts automate the caching process and incentivize caching nodes. To evaluate the performance of these caching alternatives, the authors conduct experiments using real-world datasets. The results show that on-path caching can significantly reduce network congestion and improve content delivery efficiency. The Bloom filter caching scheme achieved a cache hit rate of over 90% while reducing the cache size by up to 80% compared to traditional caching. The content-based routing scheme also achieved high cache hit rates while maintaining low latency.

An Information Centric Network for Distributed Registery withContent Unique Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credentials

Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs), a new self-manageable method of authentication that is currently being standardised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), are new standards for Content Unique Identifiers. Verifiable credentials (VCs), another ongoing standardisation (by the same W3C working group) that permits private and secure proofs of attribute ownership, are closely related to DIDs. Both of these methods rely on a central immutable decentralised registry (such as a blockchain or peer-to-peer network) where crucial meta-data is stored. Using the newly developing paradigm of Information Centric Networking (ICN), we design, construct, and evaluate a secure DID/VC registry service. The ''search by name'' feature of ICN, together with a secure protocol, are combined with the decentralised nature and our goal is to achieve technique for keeping in sync copies of an object at several locations. Our design has little network cost and provides quick lookup speeds because to ICN's built-in multicast and caching functionality

Leveraging ICN and SDN for Future Internet Architecture: A Survey

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are both new evolving network architectures that are receiving a lot of attention from researchers. ICN is a Future Internet architecture which tries to transform the current Internet architecture from location- and host-centric to content-centric, where obtaining requested data is achieved by the contents’ names regardless of the location of the data. From another angle, SDN is considered a new Internet architecture that moves the control plane management from network devices to a centralized controller. The SDN controller enhances network robustness and improves its scalability, reliability, and flexibility. The integration of ICN and SDN results in massive benefits, where SDN enhances ICN networks’ manageability, controllability, and functionality, and ICN reshapes the SDN design to make it compatible with ICN features and to enhance ICN in terms of network caching, routing, mobility, and security.. In this review paper, a comprehensive survey of the issues and challenges of integrating ICN and SDN is presented. Firstly, ICN’s main characteristics are summarized, and a short comparison between different ICN architectures is completed. Then, the key details of SDN are highlighted. Moreover, the motivation and benefits of merging ICN with SDN are summarized and the state-of-the-art work on merging ICN and SDN is reviewed and classified from several aspects. Finally, several open research issues are highlighted.

ICN‐Oriented secure propagation for smart ideology and politics

Besides the in‐network caching, Information‐Centric Networking (ICN) has also an obvious feature, that is, security distribution which could guarantee that all contents are retrieved correctly. As we know, Smart Ideology and Politics (SIP) has gained great attention from some research centers so as to ensure the national security, this is because there are many unreliable propagations on SIP. In order to realize the secure propagation for SIP, the security distribution feature of ICN could be exploited. Therefore, this letter proposes ICN‐oriented Secure Propagation for SIP, called ISP4S, including two major parts. At first, ICN network paradigm is employed to build a bran‐new infrastructures. Then, for SIP, the differential privacy protection method is proposed to construct the corresponding secure propagation paths. For the proposed ISP4S, some simulations based on ICN environment are made to verify its efficiency, and the experimental results demonstrate that ISP4S outperforms the selected baselines.

ICN-Based Enhanced Cooperative Caching for Multimedia Streaming in Resource Constrained Vehicular Environment

Today, with the worldwide offer and rapid increment in multimedia applications on the web, the demands of users to get them accessed are also increasing prominently. The users in vehicular environment too expect efficient multimedia streaming while travelling on the road. However, the high mobility of vehicles as well as the limited transmission range of infrastructure components in IP based network provides low performance by offering high delay and additional network overhead. To provide better Quality of Experience (QoE) with high performance, Information Centric Networking (ICN) is blended with vehicular environment. Caching the content inside network nodes is inherent feature of ICN with various associated benefits such as low content retrieval delay, less network traffic, path reduction and so on. However, challenges still exists for caching the content due to resource constrained network environment (such as limited cache capacity, node battery) as well as for secure delivery of cached data. To solve these challenges and to enhance network performance, we propose a cooperative caching scheme in hierarchical network architecture that jointly considers cache location as well as combined content popularity and predicted future rating score while making caching decision. The proposed approach uses two layer hierarchical architecture where nodes in edge layer are divided into clusters. The proposed scheme uses modified Weighted Clustering Algorithms (WCA) for selection of cluster heads which are then used to decide cache location. A probability matrix is used to compute content caching probability which considers both popularity and predicted future rating of content. The proposed approach dynamically predict the user's preferences using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) - a machine learning technique which eventually provides prediction of future rating. Based on the selection of both cache location and content to cache, the proposed scheme can effectively cache the content in the network. Further, to deal with the secure delivery of cached content, this work supports legitimate user authorization at edge nodes. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in MATLAB parallel computing toolkit. The results prove significant caching improvement in terms of cache hit, hop reduction and average delay using our proposed scheme.

CCJRF-ICN: A Novel Mechanism for Coadjuvant Caching Joint Request Forwarding in Information Centric Networks

Information centric networking (ICN) shifts the focus of existing internet architecture from host-oriented to content-oriented model by enabling in-network caching and content-based forwarding. These ICN features help to increase network performance by decreasing content discovery delay, content server load, and network congestion. To route a content interest inside network such that content can be fetched with minimal time is a challenging task in ICN. The performance of the ICN routing protocol can be significantly improved if the decisions related to content chunk placement and request forwarding are taken in a cooperative fashion. This paper describes a novel strategy for co-operative caching joint request forwarding in ICN, focusing on decreasing content retrieval latency. To do so, the caching strategy leverages the concept of connected dominating set (CDS) for creating a virtual backbone network to eliminate caching redundancy and reduce content discovery delay. It considers content chunk placement and request forwarding tasks as strongly co-related procedures. It exploits the caching information so that the request is forwarded to a content router (CR) with the maximum likelihood of carrying needed data using the betweenness centrality (BC) of CR. The proposed approach also uses the Markov chain-based model to estimate CS hit likelihood and use it as decisional parameter while forwarding the interest packet. This mechanism helps to fetch the content within the shortest possible time duration. The CCJRF-ICN adopts the Dijkstra's shortest path routing and works in collaboration with the CDS-driven caching joint forwarding mechanism. The simulation study of CCJRF-ICN is done inside ns-3 based ndnSIM-2.0 simulator with performance measures like content store (CS) hit ratio, content discovery delay, mean hop distance, network load, and network overhead. The simulation outcomes demonstrate that CCJRF-ICN outperforms the state-of-the-art strategies for realistic topologies (GEANT, US-26, Euro-28) and shows improvement up to 5-35% against stated performance measures.

Dynamic Hierarchical Caching Resource Allocation for 5G-ICN Slice

Network slicing and Multiple-Access Edge Computing (MEC) are key technologies in fifth-generation (5G) networks. The flexible programmability of network slicing and the decentralization of MEC facilitate the deployment of Information-Centric Networking (ICN). The caching feature of ICN can provide users with low-latency data services. Although many existing works have addressed the cache deployment problem or the cache optimization problem, most of them do not consider the issue of caching resource allocation in the dynamic and hierarchical environment. Dynamic deployment of cache nodes can improve the operator’s revenue as much as possible while accurately allocating the caching resources can reduce the user-requested latency. Therefore, in this study, a problem of the operator’s expected revenue maximization is presented in an environment combining dynamic deployment of the MECs and the caching-enabled node ICN-Gateway (ICN-GW). To solve this problem, we propose an optimal stopping theory (OST)-based dynamic hierarchical caching resources allocation (ODH-CRA) algorithm. The algorithm consists of three parts. Firstly, an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) solution is proposed to determine the optimal deployment of the MECs. This method determines the optimal location and number of the MECs by considering deployment costs and service requirement costs synthetically. Secondly, a redeployment technique based on the OST is proposed to determine the best redeployment time of the MECs according to the values of latency violations and the service latency requirements. Finally, an improved elite genetic algorithm (IEGA) is proposed to find the optimal solution of the hierarchical caching resource allocation. This method searches the optimal scheme by maximizing the operator’s revenue joint caching costs and energy consumption. Ultimately, we perform a series of simulation experiments to compare the proposed method’s performance to dynamic and hierarchical methods. Our solution can effectively reduce the latency for users’ requesting, improve the revenue of ICN Communication Service Provider (ICSP), and provide an effective caching resource allocation scheme for the next generation of Internet of Things (IoT) networks.

A Distributed Cache Placement Scheme for Large-Scale Information-Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promising candidate architecture for the future internet that leverages the content name instead of the source of the content (host address). ICN decouples the content from its original location and owner, and enables in-network caching at the network layer. Similarly, the inception of ioT has enabled futuristic applications and services in almost every walk of life. Due to the nature of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, traditional TCP/IP-based internet architecture faces challenges such as addressing, heterogeneity, availability, scalability, and resource constraints. Therefore, ICN can be a suitable choice to address these challenges in IoT applications. Among other features of ICN, the in-network caching feature increases the availability and efficiency of content-sharing in IoT networks. Therefore, it is essential to have efficient cache placement strategies in ICN to increase its utility. in this regard, in this article, we propose an ICN cache placement strategy at the edge network for IoT applications. More precisely, we design a distributed cache placement scheme that aims to push the popular content to the edge network and keep the relatively less-popular content at the core. We also propose a collaborative mechanism to fetch content from the nearest neighbor's content-store as well as propose a cache replacement policy based on the content popularity. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the proposed scheme and the obtained results show the efficiency and out-performance against similar strategies in the literature.

Distributed software defined information centric networking

Recently, a new trend has emerged based on combining software defined networking (SDN) and information centric networking (ICN) as a promising approach for the future internet. More serious control plane problems related to scalability, fault-tolerance and consistency may affect software defined information centric networking (SD-ICN) compared to traditional SDN environment regarding new augmented features such as content name-based communication and in-network caching. In this paper, we propose a distributed software defined information centric networking (DSD-ICN) that provides ICN features over SDN network with multiple controllers. We addressed in our design the fault-tolerant and strong consistency of the control plane which allows the transparent distribution of the content over different network domains.

Empowering Command and Control through a Combination of Information-Centric Networking and Software Defined Networking

Current operational scenarios are raising new challenges for the deployment of armed forces. New command and control (C2) approaches are emerging to address these problems, pushing responsibility to the edge of the battlefield in what is called network-centric C2 operations. Advances in network warfare have also led to the development of the Internet of Battle Things (IoBT), which combines everything on the battlefield that can support informed decision making. However, these new dynamics require new network paradigms that can be adapted to efficient network operations. In view of the lack of technical solutions, this work seeks to merge information-centric networking (ICN) with software-defined networking (SDN) to meet the high-level operational requirements for "C2 agility" within deployed networks. ICN provides a more efficient data distribution within "ICN islands" in the military IP network, while SDN enables ICN to be integrated with the rest of the IP network, as well as control the patterns of interaction among the IoBT heterogeneous nodes, thus enhancing ICN features. After reviewing key concepts in C2, IoBT, SDN, and ICN, the architecture was modeled in a specific application, and the first experiments have shown promising results.

Recent Advances in Information-Centric Networking-Based Internet of Things (ICN-IoT)

Information-centric networking (ICN) is being realized as a promising approach to accomplish the shortcomings of current Internet protocol-address-based networking. ICN models are based on naming the content to get rid of address-space scarcity, accessing the content via name-based-routing, and caching the content at intermediate nodes to provide reliable, efficient data delivery, and self-certifying contents to ensure better security. Obvious benefits of ICN in terms of fast and efficient data delivery and improved reliability raises ICN as highly promising networking model for Internet of Things (IoT) like environments. IoT aims to connect anyone and/or anything at any time by any path on any place. From last decade, IoT attracts both industry and research communities. IoT is an emerging research field and still in its infancy. Thus, this paper presents the potential of ICN for IoT by providing state-of-the-art literature survey. We discuss briefly the feasibility of ICN features and their models (and architectures) in the context of IoT. Subsequently, we present a comprehensive survey on ICN-based caching, naming, security, and mobility approaches for IoT with appropriate classification. Furthermore, we present operating systems and simulation tools for ICN-IoT. Finally, we provide important research challenges and issues faced by ICN for IoT.

Privacy-Aware Caching in Information-Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an emerging networking paradigm where named and routable data (content) is the focal point. Users send explicit requests (interests) which specify content by name, and the network handles routing these interests to some entity capable of satisfying them with the appropriate data response (producer). One key feature of ICN is opportunistic in-network content caching. This property facilitates efficient content distribution by reducing bandwidth consumption, lessening network congestion, and improving the content retrieval latency by users (consumers). Unfortunately, the same feature is also detrimental to privacy of content consumers and producers. Simple to implement, and difficult to detect, timing attacks can exploit ICN routers as “oracles” and allow an adversary to learn whether a nearby consumer recently requested certain content. The attack leverages a timing side channel that relies on router caches and is implemented by requesting a few packets from each piece of content being probed. Similarly, probing attacks that target content producers can be used to discover whether certain content has been recently distributed. After analyzing the scope and feasibility of such attacks, we propose and evaluate some efficient countermeasures that offer quantifiable privacy guarantees while retaining the benefits of ICN.

Testbed for ICN media distribution over LTE radio access networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) is one of the most promising research topics for the future Internet. ICN aims at circumventing several issues of current Internet protocol (IP) solutions such as efficient multimedia distribution. Given the huge growth rate of video transmission over mobile networks, it is sensible to consider how 4G/5G networks can leverage on ICN. There is a substantial body of work considering ICN for fixed networks and also for the core of mobile networks. Less attention has been dedicated to ICN on the radio access network (RAN) or ICN-RAN, which has currently a user plane based on many connection-oriented protocols. To fully benefit from ICN, mobile networks must enable it on the RAN, not only on the core. This work details an ICN deployment on the RAN of fourth and fifth generation of mobile networks (4G/5G) and also presents a testbed that enables proofs of concept of this ICN-RAN using 4G. Complementing theoretical and simulation-based works, such testbeds are essential for a technology that aims to be adopted in a scenario with a vast number of well-established (IP-based) legacy solutions. A couple of applications for the testbed are demonstrated: low-latency and real-time applications and video distribution. The results indicate, for example, that evolving ICN features can be tested with currently available tools, but the lack of hardware accelerators and optimized code limit the bit rate that can be achieved in real-time processing.

Adaptive Caching Strategy Based on Big Data Learning in ICN

In-network caching, a typical feature of information centric networking (ICN) architecture, has played an important role on the network performance. Existing caching management strategies mainly focus on minimizing the redundancy content by exploiting either node data or content data respectively, which may not lead to effectively improve the caching performance, as there is no consideration on supplementary action of these two types of data. In this paper, the correlation between node data and content data brought by the big data are analyzed and mined to determine whether the selected content are cached in a few suitable nodes, and a Big data driven Adaptive In-network Caching management strategy (BAIC) is proposed. Driven by the current state of node and content, a novel multidimensional state attribution data model including network, node and content data is proposed. Based on the data model, the mapping relationship between the status data and the matching relationship value is further analyzed and mined. And then utilizing this mapping relationship function, the matching algorithm to predict the matching relationship between the node and the content in the next time period is proposed. The simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed BAIC has significantly improved the network performance.

Fair-RTT-DAS: A robust and efficient dynamic adaptive streaming over ICN

To sustain the adequate bandwidth demands over rapidly growing multimedia traffic and considering the effectiveness of Information-Centric Networking (ICN), recently, HTTP based Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (DASH) has been introduced over ICN, which significantly increases the network bandwidth utilisation. However, we identified that the inherent features of ICN also causes new vulnerabilities in the network. In this paper, we first propose a novel attack called as Bitrate Oscillation Attack (BOA), which exploits fundamental ICN characteristics: in-network caching and interest aggregation, to disrupt DASH functionality. In particular, the proposed attack forces the bitrate and resolution of video received by the attacked client to oscillate with high frequency and high amplitude during the streaming process. To detect and mitigate BOA, we design and implement a reactive countermeasure called Fair-RTT-DAS. Our solution ensures efficient bandwidth utilisation and improves the user perceived Quality of Experience (QoE) in the presence of varying content source locations. For this purpose, Fair-RTT-DAS consider DASH’s two significant features: round-trip-time (RTT) and throughput fairness. In the presence of BOA in a network, our simulation results show an increase in the annoyance factor in user’s spatial dimension, i.e., increase in oscillation frequency and amplitude. The results also show that our countermeasure significantly alleviates these adverse effects and makes dynamic adaptive streaming friendly to ICN’s implicit features.

Software Defined Networking Meets Information Centric Networking: A Survey

Information centric networking (ICN) and software-defined networking (SDN) are two emerging networking paradigms that promise to solve different aspects of networking problems. ICN is a clean-slate design for accommodating the ever increasing growth of the Internet traffic by regarding content as the network primitive, adopting in-network caching, and name-based routing, while SDN focuses on agile and flexible network management by decoupling network control logic from data forwarding. ICN and SDN have gained significant research attention separately in the most of the previous work. However, the features of ICN have profound impacts on the design and operation of SDN, such as in-network caching and data-centric security. Conversely, SDN provides a powerful tool for experimenting and deploying ICN architectures and can greatly facilitate ICN functionality and management. In this paper, we point out the necessity of surveying the scattered works on integrating SDN and ICN (SD-ICN) for improving operational networks. Specifically, we analyze the points of SD-ICN strengths and opportunities, and discuss the SDN enablers for deploying ICN architectures. In addition, we review and classify the recent work on improving the network management by SD-ICN and discuss the potential security benefits of SD-ICN. Finally, a number of open issues and future trends are highlighted.

NCPP-based caching and NUR-based resource allocation for information-centric networking

Recently, Information-centric networking (ICN) has flourished research interest. One common and important feature of ICN is that has built-in caching capability, which means that every node can cache content along the content delivery path. To improve the transmission efficiency of content dissemination, we propose an efficient caching scheme for ICN, which is named as NCPP-based caching scheme. In our proposed caching scheme, we use the definition of node-content pass probability (NCPP), which taking both node utilization ratio and popularity of content into consideration, to decide whether the node needs to cache the content. In addition, the reasonable resource allocation can also improve the performance of ICN. Therefore, we propose a NUR-based resource allocation scheme, which uses the definition of node utilization radio (NUR). We compare the server hit ratio of random caching scheme and the proposed caching scheme by simulation. Our results show that our proposed scheme has smaller server hit ratio than random caching scheme. Furthermore, our proposed caching scheme depends on the number of requests.