Information-centric Networking Features Research Articles

5G-ICN: Delivering ICN Services over 5G Using Network Slicing

The challenging requirements of 5G--from both the applications and the architecture perspectives--motivate the need to explore the feasibility of delivering services over new network architectures. As 5G proposes application-centric network slicing, which enables the use of new data planes realizable over a programmable compute, storage, and transport infrastructure, we consider Information-centric Networking (ICN) as a candidate network architecture to realize 5G objectives. This can co-exist with end-to-end IP services that are offered today. To this effect, we first propose a 5G-ICN architecture and compare its benefits (i.e., innovative services offered by leveraging ICN features) to current 3GPP-based mobile architectures. We then introduce a general application-driven framework that emphasizes on the flexibility afforded by Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) over which 5G-ICN can be realized. We specifically focus on the issue of how mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) can be realized as a 5G-ICN slice, and give an in-depth overview on resource provisioning and inter-dependencies and -coordinations among functional 5G-ICN slices to meet the MaaS objectives.

Information-centric cost-efficient optimization for multimedia content delivery in mobile vehicular networks

Providing high-quality multimedia services is a challenging and high-cost task in mobile vehicular networks due to intermittent connectivity, highly dynamic capacity, mostly associated to heterogeneous hosts distribution and their high mobility. Information-centric networking (ICN), which adopts novel content-based dissemination instead of the traditional host-based one, has great potential to accomplish cost-efficient quality-oriented multimedia delivery. This paper proposes a novel cost-Efficient Multimedia content Delivery approach (EcoMD) in vehicular networks leveraging the ICN features. In EcoMD, two essential factors are first analyzed and modeled: content mobility and supply-demand balance, and then, a mixed integer programming (MIP) optimization is formulated to minimize the economic cost associated to guaranteed the quality level of multimedia services. To resolve this NP-hard problem, heuristic mechanisms are proposed covering three aspects: priority-based path selection, least-required source maintaining and on-demand caching enhancement. By comparison with existing state-of-the-art solutions, simulation results demonstrate how EcoMD provides an improved performance in terms of start-up delay, jitter, playback continuity, and Quality of Experience (QoE) while particularly reduces the economic cost.

CPHR: In-Network Caching for Information-Centric Networking With Partitioning and Hash-Routing

Recently, research on Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has flourished, which attempts to shift from the current host-oriented Internet architecture to an information-oriented one. The built-in caching capability is a typical feature of ICN. In this paper, in order to fully exploit the built-in caching capability of ICN, we propose a collaborative in-network caching scheme with Content-space Partitioning and Hash-Routing, which is named as CPHR. By intelligently partitioning the content space and assigning partitions to caches, CPHR is able to constrain the path stretch incurred by hash-routing. We formulate the problem of assigning partitions to caches into an optimization problem of maximizing the overall hit ratio and propose a heuristic algorithm to solve it. We also formulate the partitioning proportion problem into a min-max linear optimization problem to balance cache workloads. By simulations with both the characteristics of real Internet traffic and traces of peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, we show the necessity of collaborative caching since the en-route caching mode cannot yield a considerable overall hit ratio with practical cache size. It is shown as well that CPHR can significantly increase the overall hit ratio by up to about 100% with the practical cache policy Least Recently Used (LRU) while the overhead incurred is acceptable in terms of propagation latency and load on links.

Efficient content delivery in mobile ad-hoc networks using CCN

Information-centric networking (ICN) is emerging as a future network technology. It has introduced the great advantage of information dissemination with low bandwidth consumption in wired testbed networks. Recently, ICN is also studied for mobile ad-hoc networks environments for efficient content distribution. In the existing works in the literature, broadcast delivery is actively utilized for designing new routing schemes since it seems well fitted to the nature of ICN conceptually. In this paper, we raise questions about this research direction by analysing the performance of reliability and energy efficiency of both broadcast and unicast delivery schemes. Our analysis shows that unicast delivery outperforms broadcast delivery, unless topological changes incur too much packet flooding overhead. Based on this observation, we present a novel energy efficient content distribution scheme that delivers the content in a unicast manner while minimizing flooding overhead by taking advantage of ICN features. Via ns-3 simulation, we compare the performance of the proposed scheme with that of other comparative schemes, and show that the proposed scheme achieves much higher reliability and energy efficiency in content distribution under mobile ad-hoc network environments.

A Survey of Caching Mechanisms in Information-Centric Networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a novel networking paradigm that attracts increasing research interests in recent years. In-network caching has been viewed as an attractive feature of ICN because it can reduce network traffic, alleviate server bottleneck, and reduce the user access latencies. Because of this, the network community has proposed many in-network caching mechanisms that aim at optimizing various performance metrics such as cache hit ratio and cache hit distance. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of the recently proposed in-network caching mechanisms for ICN. For each caching mechanism, we describe it in detail, present examples to illustrate how it works, and analyze its possible benefits and drawbacks. We also compare some typical in-network caching mechanisms through extensive simulations and discuss the remaining research challenges.