Information Centric Networking Nodes Research Articles

Blockchain-based Collaborative Caching Mechanism for Information Center IoT

The development of fifth generation mobile communication (5G) technology and Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled more mobile terminals to access the network and generate huge amounts of information content. This will make it difficult for the traditional IP-based host-to-host model to cope with the demand for massive data transmission, making network congestion an increasingly serious problem. To cope with these problems, a new network architecture, the Information-Centric Networking (ICN), a content network with content caching as one of its most core functions, has emerged. In addition, in the era when 5G and future 6G networks gradually realize the interconnection of everything, the Information-Centric Internet of Things (IC-IoT) based on ICN architecture has emerged, and a large number of IoT devices can use ICN nodes as edge devices to realize collaborative caching. The caching capacity of IC-IoT is directly related to the transmission efficiency and capacity of the whole network, and the performance of IC-IoT caching capacity is the top priority of research in this field. To address the above issues, the research in this paper focuses on deploying blockchains in IC-IoT networks and using the consensus mechanism of custom blockchains to motivate ICN nodes and non-ICN nodes in the network to perform caching collaboratively, which in turn improves the caching capacity of the whole network. The main work of this paper has the following points. First, incentivize IC-IoT collaborative caching based on blockchain consensus mechanism: by deploying blockchain in IC-IoT, rewarding nodes that obtain bookkeeping rights to incentivize network-wide collaborative caching, and designing experiments to compare the caching capacity of the network before and after the incentive; second, improve DPoS consensus mechanism to incentivize collaborative caching: Experiments are designed to compare the incentive capacity of PoW consensus mechanism and improved DPoS consensus mechanism for IC-IoT network collaborative caching, and to select the consensus mechanism with better performance; third, the design and implementation of IC-IoT test bed: write ICN program to form ICN network from basic communication to multiple nodes, and then deploying blockchain on the network for subsequent extension studies. This thesis demonstrates the feasibility of using blockchain for IC-IoT network cache collaborative incentive, and proves that the blockchain incentive method in this paper can improve the throughput of IC-IoT network cache by building a test bed.

Forwarding and caching in video streaming over ICSDN: A clean-slate publish-subscribe approach

Nowadays, Internet usage has become prevalent, primarily because of high-quality heterogeneous multimedia content expectations from the subscriber (consumer), which puts tremendous pressure on the publisher (producer) in the networks. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a future internet architecture that optimizes data resources through content-based forwarding and caching, making it well-suited for multimedia content and video streaming (VS) scenarios. However, real-time data delivery is challenging in the current ICN-based publish–subscribe (pub-sub) mechanism, which pushes the existing pub-sub studies to prioritize more on the forwarding information base (FIB) rather than the pending interest table (PIT). This leads to issues such as inefficient caching and forwarding mechanisms, high overhead, and communication costs. To address these challenges, in this paper, we present a novel forwarding and caching solution named VS-ICSDN, integrating the combined principles of ICN-based pub-sub scheme and software-defined networking (SDN) in order to utilize the network resources more efficiently. We design a clean-slate caching strategy and name-based forwarding method to support both on-path and off-path caching on ICN nodes to coordinate flow entries among the SDN controller and clean-slate ICN nodes to maximize PIT utilization. In addition, the framework allows the content to be stored and searched in chunks with a single request to access the desired content, reducing the communication overhead and significantly improving overall performance. A simulation-based testbed and experimental result analysis validate our proposed work’s effectiveness in ensuring efficient network resource usage with low communication overhead and computational cost compared to other baseline methods.

Trust-Enhanced Content Delivery in Blockchain-Based Information-Centric Networking

With the fast-growing demands for efficient and scalable content distribution, information-centric networking (ICN) can be a promising candidate for future networks. ICN promises direct retrieval of the content using its unique, persistent, and location-independent name. In ICN, all nodes work together to scale up content delivery, but security issues caused by malicious behaviors of ICN nodes cannot be avoided. To this end, in this article we develop a trust-enhanced blockchain based ICN (BICN) architecture for content delivery. In our proposed architecture, the whole process of content delivery is first traced in an implicitly trusted way by exploiting the excellent properties of the blockchain, so that the malicious ICN nodes can be located. Second, we leverage transactions to record the mapping between human-readable name and self-certifying name in BICN, which supports convenient and trusted alteration for users' requirements. Moreover, we present a case study in BICN based smart grid for energy data delivery, where we perform security analysis and conduct experiments. Numerical results show the superior performance of our proposal. Finally, we present open issues for future work.

PrivICN: Privacy-preserving content retrieval in information-centric networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has emerged as a paradigm to cope with the increasing demand for content delivery on the Internet. In contrast to the Internet Protocol (IP), the underlying architecture of ICN enables users to request contents based on their name rather than their hosting location (IP address). On the one hand, this preserves users’ anonymity since packet routing does not require source and destination addresses of the communication parties. On the other hand, semantically-rich names reveal information about users’ interests, which poses serious threats to their privacy. A curious ICN node can monitor the traffic to profile users’ or censor specific contents for instance. In this paper, we present PrivICN: a system that enhances users privacy in ICN by protecting the confidentiality of content names and content data. PrivICN relies on a proxy encryption scheme and has several features that distinguish it from existing solutions: it preserves full in-network caching benefits, it does not require end-to-end communication between consumers and providers and it provides flexible user management (addition/removal of users). We evaluate PrivICN in a real ICN network (CCNx implementation) showing that it introduces an acceptable overhead and little delay. PrivICN is publicly available as an open-source library.

Preventing unauthorized access in information centric networking

The increasing traffic volume and new requirements of highly scalable and efficient distribution of contents exceed the capabilities of the current Internet architecture. Information centric networking (ICN) is a new communication paradigm for the next generation internet (NGI), which focuses mainly on contents. ICN has in‐network caching capability, which enables any node to cache any content coming from any publisher. ICN subscribers are able to access contents from different distributed locations. This capability maximizes the problem of unauthorized access to ICN contents. In this paper, we propose a decentralized elliptic curve‐based access control (ECAC) protocol for ICN architectures. In this protocol, fewer public messages are needed for access control enforcement between ICN subscribers and ICN nodes than the existing access control protocols. ECAC protocol depends on ICN self‐certifying naming scheme. We perform security analysis on ECAC for the following attacks: man‐in‐the‐middle, forward security, replay attacks, integrity, and privacy violations. We also evaluate communication, computational, and storage overhead for performance analysis to ECAC. Based on our results that are obtained under various scenarios, ECAC efficiently prevents unauthorized access to ICN contents.

A Context-Aware Green Information-Centric Networking Model for Future Wireless Communications

This research proposes a novel wireless information-centric networking (ICN) architecture, namely, Context-Aware Green ICN Model (CAGIM), which can adapt the power consumption of network nodes to optimized values according to the associated link utilization. The power adaption in ICN nodes is conducted through dynamically adjusting the link-rate corresponding to content popularity and traffic load to reduce wasteful energy consumption. Moreover, we propose a smart popularity-based caching strategy, called distinguished caching scheme (DCS), with the introduction of hot and cold-caching partitions of ICN node’s cache storage for popular and non-popular content objects, respectively. DCS improves the content diversity of the cache storage by adjusting, for each content, the number of chunks to be cached at ICN nodes based on its type and popularity level. DCS thus can further decrease the network system power consumption, thanks to its improved cache hit that reduces network traffic load. Toward the goal of realizing a context-aware green wireless network system with efficient content delivery, we also design a Wi-Fi Direct based scheme as an alternative approach to minimize power consumption and latency by sharing essential/important content objects via direct communications with power-saving mechanisms in the case that wireless local area network connections are not available. The evaluation results show that CAGIM can improve network efficiency by reducing both hop-count and power consumption considerably compared with existing wireless network systems with different well-known caching schemes. This proposal enables a flexible and efficient content delivery mechanism for future networks with various real-life scenarios, like Green building, Green company, and Green campus content accesses.

Supporting the Web with an information centric network that routes by name

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new paradigm in which the network layer provides users with content, instead of providing communication channels between hosts, and is aware of the name (or identifiers) of the contents. A fundamental ICN operation is the routing of content requests towards a node that is able to provide the requested content. To meet this goal, different routing architectures have been proposed so far.In this paper, we consider a network that uses a routing-by-name architecture, i.e. content requests are routed on the base of the content name by using a name-based routing table. We focus on the scenario of fetching Web contents, assuming to use ICN in place of traditional TCP/IP means. In this scenario we need to handle tens of billions of name-based routes, due to the high numbers of Web contents and to the limited aggregability of their names. Consequently, re-using the existing architecture of an IP router would result in two severe problems. First, the current Forwarding Information Base (FIB) technology is unable to contain all name-based routes. Second, implementing a so large Routing Information Base (RIB) requires a very costly hardware. In order to overcome these problems, we propose a routing-by-name architecture, named Lookup-and-Cache, where the FIB is used as a cache of routes, while the RIB is stored in a remote and centralized routing engine. By analyzing real Internet traces, we prove the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, which we also show to be feasible with current technology. In fact, our ICN nodes require to have only a limited set of routes in their FIB, even when supporting a high number of traffic flows.We have implemented our proposed Lookup-and-Cache solution within the CCNx software framework and we used this implementation to assess system performance, such as download delay, lookup rate and fairness.The paper is completed with a discussion on how ICN can be used not only to fetch Web contents but also for other scenarios.