Information-centric Networking Forwarding Research Articles

An Efficient Content Store-Based Forwarding Scheme for Internet of Things.

One of the main advantages of information-centric networking (ICN) is that a requested piece of content can be retrieved from a content store (CS) at any intermediate node, instead of its original content producer. In existing ICN designs, nodes forward Interest packets mainly based on forwarding information base (FIB). FIB is constructed from name prefixes registered by content producers with a list of next hops to the name prefixes. The ICN forwarding engine uses those information to forward Interest packets towards corresponding content producers. CS information of a node is currently used only for checking the availability of cached content objects at the node and is not considered in the data plane of existing ICN forwarding mechanisms. This paper highlights the importance of CS information in an ICN forwarding mechanism and enables neighbor CS information in the data plane to improve the cache hit ratio and forwarding efficiency, especially for resource-constraint Internet of Things (IoT). We propose an efficient CS-based forwarding scheme for IoT. The proposed forwarding scheme exploits CS information of neighbors to find efficient routes to forward Interest packets toward nearby nodes with corresponding cached content. For that, we carefully design an efficient way for CS information sharing using counting bloom filter. We implement the proposed scheme and compare with state-of-the-art ICN forwarding schemes in IoT. Experimental results indicate that the proposed forwarding scheme achieves a significant improvement in terms of cache hit ratio, energy efficiency, content retrieval latency, and response rate.

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.

Privacy-Preserving Forwarding Using Homomorphic Encryption for Information-Centric Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In order to improve the forwarding performance of the information-centric networking (ICN) paradigm in wireless ad hoc environments, different nodes' properties, such as geographical position and topological centrality, have been proposed as metrics to identify the suitability of a node as a forwarder. However, while these metrics may be efficient in terms of node selection, they can breach the privacy of the node itself. The more efficient these metrics are, the more private information they may reveal. In this letter, we propose a privacy-preserving ICN forwarding scheme based on homomorphic encryption for wireless ad hoc networks.

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.

Online Caching and Cooperative Forwarding in Information Centric Networking

Information centric networking is one of the most promising future Internet architectures to tackle the increasing network traffic by enabling in-network caching to cache popular contents. Although in-network caching reduces the network traffic by providing requested content locally to the users, several challenging issues are still unsolved. For example, identical contents are replicated in all routers along each request’s forwarding path, which incurs faster cache replacement and degrades cache utilization, and temporally cached content’s locations are not easy to track or search in the network. Besides, it is tough to correctly predict future popularity of contents and decide which contents to store. Hence, in this paper, an online caching and cooperative forwarding scheme is proposed to enhance cache utilization and to reduce network delay, as well as reduce the workload on each router. The caching problem is formulated as a Ski-Rental problem, which is a classical method for online decision making, in combination with consistent-hashing to obtain an online coordinated caching solution. The proposed request forwarding scheme is based on consistent-hashing, where every router knows the potential location of the cached copy of the requested content and thereby avoiding the unnecessary forwarding. Finally, the proposed request forwarding and caching schemes were validated by a chunk-level simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of content hit rate, server load, the processing load on routers, and access delay.

DICE

Coupled with the rapid increase in mobile device users and the bandwidth and latency demands are the continuous increase of devices’ processing capabilities, storage, and wireless connectivity options. The multiple radio access technology (multi-RAT) is proposed to satisfy mobile users’ increasing needs. The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is better tuned (than the current Internet Protocol approach) to support multi-RAT communications. ICN eschews the connection-based content retrieval model used today and has desirable features such as data naming, in-network caching, and device mobility–a paradigm ripe for exploration. We propose DICE, an ICN forwarding strategy that helps a device dynamically select a subset of its multi-RAT interfaces for communication. DICE assesses the state of edge links and network congestion to determine the minimum number of interfaces required to perform data delivery. We perform simulations to compare DICE’s performance with bestroute2 and multicast strategies (part of the named data networking simulator, ndnSIM). We show that DICE is the best of both worlds: providing a higher delivery ratio (0.2–2 times) and much lower overhead (by 2–8 times) for different packet rates.

A novel hybrid forwarding strategy for content delivery in wireless information-centric networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a promising solution for content delivery in multi-hop wireless networks. In these environments, the ICN forwarding strategies typically rely on broadcasting, which facilitates content distribution by taking advantage of the shared medium, but brings about undesirable side effects. To avoid the broadcast-related issues of packet redundancy and unreliability due its unacknowledged mode, a few recent proposals advocated unicasting as the communication mode to resort to, once the content provider has been discovered. However, unicasting may suffer from connectivity breakages due to node mobility and harsh propagation conditions, and, generally, limits the data sharing capability of the wireless medium.In this paper, we design a robust ICN-based forwarding strategy, called Ad Hoc Dynamic Unicast (ADU), that wisely harnesses unicast and broadcast primitives on top of IEEE 802.11-based wireless networks. ADU relies on unicasting for content dissemination after the provider discovery, and promptly falls back to broadcast to find a new content provider in case of a link failure notified by the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. Extensive simulations in two different multi-hop wireless scenarios, i.e., mobile and vehicular ad hoc networks, under different load settings, assess the ADU performance against benchmark ICN forwarding schemes, representative of broadcast-based and unicast-based solutions. Results show that ADU outperforms them in all circumstances, proving its better responsiveness to link failures, which guarantees a shorter content retrieval delay and a lower message overhead and energy consumption.