Information-Centric Networking Routing Research Articles

A Novel Multipath Transmission Scheme for Information-Centric Networking

Due to the overload of IP semantics, the traditional TCP/IP network has a number of problems in scalability, mobility, and security. In this context, information-centric networking (ICN) is proposed to solve these problems. To reduce the cost of deployment and smoothly evolve, the ICN architecture needs to be compatible with existing IP infrastructure. However, the rigid underlying IP routing regulation limits the data transmission efficiency of ICN. In this paper, we propose a novel multipath transmission scheme by utilizing the characteristics and functions of ICN to enhance data transmission. The process of multipath transmission can be regarded as a service, and a multipath transmission service ID (MPSID) is assigned. By using the ICN routers bound to the MPSID as relay nodes, multiple parallel paths between the data source and the receiver are constructed. Moreover, we design a path management mechanism, including path selection and path switching. It can determine the initial path based on historical transmission information and switch to other optimal paths according to the congestion degree during transmission. The experimental results show that our proposed method can improve the average throughput and reduce the average flow completion time and the average chunk completion time.

ICN‐oriented optimization for real‐time English translation system

Information‐Centric Networking (ICN) changes the network communication mode from host‐centric to information‐centric, which directly identifies content in a unified manner and conducts positioning, routing and transmission based on content. In‐network caching is used to speed up content distribution and build the network into an integrated platform for information transmission, storage and service. ICN is regarded as one of the most promising next generation internet architectures. Because of in‐network caching strategy of ICN, English corpus content is cached by ICN router, so as to perform real‐time English translation. Therefore, this study proposes a caching strategy based on English corpus content popularity. Compared with the existing caching strategy, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can improve lagging probability, latency and accuracy in real‐time English translation. The real‐time English translation is performed through the English corpus content, and the router caches the corpus content. After user request routing in the process of translation, if the related translation content hit the cache en‐route, it will respond directly instead of obtaining the corpus from the server every time. Through nearby services, the transmission efficiency of corpus content is improved, and fast response and real‐time translation are achieved.

An Effective Transmission Scheme Based on Early Congestion Detection for Information-Centric Network

As one of the candidates for future network architecture, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has revolutionized the manner of content retrieval by transforming the communication mode from host-centric to information-centric. Unlike a traditional TCP/IP network, ICN uses a location-independent name to identify content and takes a receiver-driven model to retrieve the content. Moreover, ICN routers not only perform a forwarding function but also act as content providers due to pervasive in-network caching. The network traffic is more complicated and routers are more prone to congestion. These distinguished characteristics pose new challenges to ICN transmission control mechanism. In this paper, we propose an effective transmission scheme by combining the receiver-driven transport protocol and the router-driven congestion detection mechanism. We first outline the process of content retrieval and transmission in an IP-compatible ICN architecture and propose a practical receiver-driven transport protocol. Then, we present an early congestion detection mechanism applied on ICN routers based on an improved Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithm and design a receiver-driven congestion control algorithm. Finally, experiment results show that the proposed transmission scheme can maintain high bandwidth utilization and significantly reduce transmission delay and packet loss 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.

Content delivery enhancement in Vehicular Social Network with better routing and caching mechanism

Vehicular Social Network (VSN) emerges as one meaningful scenario of Mobile Social Network (MSN) and aims at addressing the traffic congestion and security problems in smart cities. However, the current IP based network connection cannot efficiently solve the high mobility and dynamically changing topology issues caused by VSN, which results in long routing latency and low cache hit ratio. In this regard, this work intends to optimize the routing latency and the cache hit ratio by solving the content delivery problem in VSN, during which the concepts of fog/edge computing and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) are introduced, since they can provide a new perspective of network connection in VSN by concentrating on contents instead of IP addresses. Firstly, the ICN routing table structure is expanded for the purpose of providing key routing basis for both interest and data packets. Secondly, the vehicle social information is fully explored from the points of relationship strength and interest degree to offer reliable data foundation for community detection and packet forwarding. Thirdly, the dynamic vehicle communities are constructed based on an improved community overlap propagation algorithm. By monitoring the content popularity and cache distribution in the dynamic communities, this paper proposes the vehicle-adaptive caching scheme which guarantees the cache diversity and improves the packet delivery rate. After that, a vehicle-adaptive interest packet routing scheme is proposed based on relationship strength and interest degree for both inter/intra communities. The experiment results indicate that the proposed mechanism can improve the network performance in terms of the packet delivery rate, the average hop, the average delay and the overhead.

ICN routing strategy based on reinforcement learning and neural network

Information‐Centric Networking (ICN) provides network infrastructure services to distribute and retrieve the content in more efficient way, in which the content is the only abstract entity with the arbitrary form. In particular, ICN routing plays an important role to support interest request and content distribution. Different from the previous routing proposals, this paper presents a Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Neural Network (NN) based ICN routing strategy to improve the distribution efficiency and the stability. Meanwhile, RL is used to obtain the stable routing, while NN is used to predict network delay and enhance the routing efficiency. The simulation experiments are driven based on NDNSIM, and the results show that the proposed ICN routing strategy is feasible and efficient.

Software‐defined information‐centric networking based exercise intensity evaluation of volleyball player: An efficient convolutional neural network method

The exercise intensity evaluation has been accepted as a research hotspot in the field of body area network, where the data collection plays the considerably important role. In this letter, the exercise intensity evaluation of volleyball player is conducted based on two emerging networking paradigms, that is, Software‐Defined Networking (SDN) and Information‐Centric Networking (ICN). To be specific, SDN is used to monitor the exercise intensity data via the functions of centralized control and global network view; at the same time, ICN router is responsible for storing the important and frequently used exercise intensity data via the ability of in‐network caching. In addition, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is exploited to train the exercise intensity data and further to conduct the behaviors of volleyball player. The experimental results show that the proposed evaluation method is efficient.

An Incrementally Deployable IP-Compatible-Information-Centric Networking Hierarchical Cache System

The major advantage of information-centric networking (ICN) lies in in-network caching. Ubiquitous cache nodes reduce the user’s download latency of content and the drain of network bandwidth, which enables efficient content distribution. Due to the huge cost of updating an entire network infrastructure, it is realistic for ICN to be integrated into an IP network, which poses new challenges to design a cache system and corresponding content router. In this paper, we firstly observed that the behavior pattern of data requests based on a name resolution system (NRS) makes an ICN cache system implicitly form a hierarchical and nested structure. We propose a complete design and an analytical model to characterize an uncooperative hierarchical ICN caching system compatible with IP. Secondly, to facilitate the incremental deployment of an ICN cache system in an IP network, we designed and implemented a cache-supported router with multi-terabyte cache capabilities. Finally, the simulation and measurement results show the accuracy of proposed analytical model, the significant gains on hit ratio, and the access latency of the hierarchical ICN cache system compared with a flat cache system based on naming routing, as well as the high performance of the implemented ICN router.

Powering Smart Homes with Information-Centric Networking

The growing trend of video traffic and ubiquitous Internet of Things applications have created substantial challenges for the host-centric communication model of today's Internet. As the major consumers of video applications and IoT devices, smart homes have become one of the critical components in the Internet ecosystem. In this article, we introduce a novel concept of intelligent and programmable home routers to power smart homes in the information-centric networking (ICN) architecture, which advocates a new content- centric communication paradigm for efficient content distribution and improved cybersecurity. The main features of the envisioned home ICN routers include at-edge cooperative caching for efficient content distributions, content modeling for security monitoring, and a delegation model of security operations between intelligent home ICN routers with resource-constrained IoT devices. The envisioned home ICN routers with much desired characteristics are a promising direction for addressing the rising challenges in operating, managing, and securing millions of smart home networks in the ICN architecture.

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.

Orchestrating Caching, Transcoding and Request Routing for Adaptive Video Streaming Over ICN

Information-centric networking (ICN) has been touted as a revolutionary solution for the future of the Internet, which will be dominated by video traffic. This work investigates the challenge of distributing video content of adaptive bitrate (ABR) over ICN. In particular, we use the in-network caching capability of ICN routers to serve users; in addition, with the help of named function, we enable ICN routers to transcode videos to lower-bitrate versions to improve the cache hit ratio. Mathematically, we formulate this design challenge into a constrained optimization problem, which aims to maximize the cache hit ratio for service providers and minimize the service delay for endusers. We design a two-step iterative algorithm to find the optimum. First, given a content management scheme, we minimize the service delay via optimally configuring the routing scheme. Second, we maximize the cache hits for a given routing policy. Finally, we rigorously prove its convergence. Through extensive simulations, we verify the convergence and the performance gains over other algorithms. We also find that more resources should be allocated to ICN routers with a heavier request rate, and the routing scheme favors the shortest path to schedule more traffic.

A comparative study of name resolution and routing mechanisms in information-centric networks

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an innovative paradigm for the future internet architecture, which addresses IP network limitations in supporting content distribution and information access by decoupling content from hosts and providing the ability to retrieve a content object by its name (identifier), rather than its storage location (IP address). Name resolution and routing is critical for content retrieval in ICN networks. In this research, we perform a comparative study of two widely used classes of ICN name resolution and routing schemes, namely flooding and Distributed Hash Table (DHT). We consider the flooding-based routing in Content-Centric Networks due to its wide acceptance. For the DHT scheme, we design a multi-level DHT that takes into account the underlying network topology and uses name aggregation to further reduce control overhead and improve network efficiency. Then, we compare the characteristics and performance of these two classes of name resolution and routing through extensive simulations. The evaluation results show that the performances of these two approaches are reliant on several factors, including network size, content location dynamics, and content popularity. Our study reveals insights into the design tradeoffs and offers guidelines for design strategies.

DADI: Defending against distributed denial of service in information‐centric networking routing and caching

Information‐centric networking (ICN) is a new communication paradigm for the upcoming next‐generation internet (NGI). ICN is an open environment that depends on in‐network caching and focuses on contents. These attributes make ICN architectures subject to different types of routing and caching attacks. An attacker publishes invalid contents or announces malicious routes and sends malicious requests for available and unavailable contents. These types of attacks can cause distributed denial of service (DDoS) and cache pollution in ICN architectures. In this paper,we propose a Defending solution Against DDoS in ICN routing and caching (DADI) that detects and prevents these DDoS attacks. This solution allows ICN routers to differentiate between legitimate and attack behaviors in the detection phase based on threshold values. In the prevention phase, ICN routers are able to take actions against these attacks. In our experiments, we measure satisfied requests for legitimate users and cache hit ratio for ICN routers, which are evaluated over different scenarios when there are 20%, 50%, and 80% attackers with respect to legitimate users. The experiments show that the proposed solution effectively mitigates routing‐ and caching‐related DDoS attacks in ICN and enhances ICN performance in the existence of DDoS attacks.

On Caching and Routing in Information-Centric Networks

With the exponential growth of content in recent years, users are primarily interested in obtaining particular content and are not concerned with the host housing the content. By treating content as a first class citizen, information- centric networks (ICN) seek to transform the Internet from a host-to-host communication model to a content-centric model. A key component of ICN is to cache content at storage-enabled routers. By caching content at in-network routers, network performance can be improved by delivering content from routers closer to the user and not from the origin servers (content custodians). In this article, we provide an overview of the state-of-the-art cache management and routing policies in ICN. We present a small comparison study of some state-of-the-art algorithms on a real Internet topology to help the reader appreciate how the different strategies compare against one another. Our simulation results demonstrate that it is hard to pick a winner among existing policies. We conclude the article with a discussion of open research questions.

Energy-efficient ICN routing mechanism with QoS support

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) brings a promising networking paradigm which changes host-centric communication mode, and its routing decision depends on the unknown and named content item rather than the known IP address. In this paper, we propose a novel Energy-efficient Quality of Service (QoS) Routing mechanism for ICN (EQRI). Firstly, we evaluate the suitability of link state to user’s QoS requirements by Cauchy distribution model and formulate the energy efficiency of link by monitoring the corresponding traffic. Secondly, we design a priority determination strategy based on QoS and energy efficiency, a color management strategy to assign color for outgoing interface, and a backtracking strategy to cope with the failed Interest packet. Thirdly, we propose a link selection algorithm based on color management, priority determination and backtracking strategy. Finally, we devise an ICN routing mechanism which consists of Interest packet routing and Data packet routing. The experimental results show that EQRI not only retrieves the content effectively but also outperforms existent mechanisms.

RISC: ICN routing mechanism incorporating SDN and community division

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is one promising architecture paradigm which is a profound shift from address-centric communication model to information-centric one. Although ICN routing has attracted much attention from researchers, there are few researches on improving it inspired by other fields. In this paper, we propose a Routing mechanism for ICN incorporating Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Community division (RISC), by decoupling control plane from data plane and dividing ICN topology into different communities. Firstly, we propose a community division scheme based on maximal tree in order to help retrieve the content conveniently and effectively. Secondly, we place all information about contents and forwarding into the corresponding information center for the centralized management. Thirdly, we design a routing mechanism which consists of intra-community routing based on same community information and inter-community routing based on social relationship among communities. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed RISC not only speeds up content retrieval but also outperforms existent methods.

ACO-inspired ICN Routing mechanism with Mobility support

Nowadays, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has been accepted as a promising paradigm in which users retrieve named content with information-centric communication mode rather than finding IP address with host-centric communication mode. Although ICN routing has attracted much attention from researchers, the current proposals cannot effectively and intelligently solve the mobility problem in a self-adaptive and self-organizing manner. In this paper, we introduce Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) into ICN and propose a novel ACO-inspired ICN Routing mechanism with Mobility support (AIRM) to retrieve the content no matter where it moves. At first, a continuous pheromone updating strategy inspired by alcohol volatilization model is devised to conduct the forwarding of interest ant. Secondly, we determine which outgoing interfaces can be used to forward interest ant, propose a computation scheme to obtain the forwarding probability, and select an outgoing interface to forward interest ant by roulette model. Thirdly, the detailed design on AIRM is presented to address mobility while retrieving the closest content copy. Finally, we evaluate the proposed AIRM, and the simulation results show that AIRM not only solves the mobility problem effectively but also has better performance than existent schemes in terms of routing success rate, routing hop count, load balance degree and execution time.

Characteristic time routing in information centric networks

Information centric networking (ICN) aims to transform today’s Internet from a host-centric model to a content-centric one by caching content internally within the network at storage-enabled nodes. Recently, multiple routing and cache management strategies have been proposed [1,2,3,4,5,6] to improve the user-level performance, primarily latency in ICN. In this paper, we define latency as the download time for a piece of content. In this paper, we propose a simple routing strategy that leverages the concept of characteristic time to improve latency. Characteristic time for a content in a cache indicates the amount of time in future a recently accessed content is likely to remain in that cache. Our proposed algorithm namely, Characteristic Time Routing (CTR) uses characteristic time information to forward requests to caches where the content is likely to be found. CTR augments native routing strategies (e.g., Dijkstra’s algorithm), works with existing cache management and cache replacement policies and thus can be implemented in ICN prototypes with minimal effort. We perform exhaustive simulation in the Icarus simulator [7] using realistic Internet topologies (e.g., GEANT, WIDE, TISCALI, ROCKETFUEL [8]) and demonstrate that the CTR algorithm provides approximately 10–50% improvement in latency over state-of-the-art routing and caching management strategies for ICN for a wide range of simulation parameters.

Cache-Filter: A Cache Permission Policy for Information-Centric Networking

Information Centric Networking (ICN) has recently attracted great attention. It names the content decoupling from the location and introduces network caching, making the content to be cached anywhere within the network. The benefits of such design are obvious, however, many challenges still need to be solved. Among them, the local caching policy is widely discussed and it can be further divided into two parts, namely the cache permission policy and the cache replacement policy. The former is used to decide whether an incoming content should be cached while the latter is used to evict a cached content if required. The Internet is a user-oriented network and popular contents always have much more requests than unpopular ones. Caching such popular contents closer to the user’s location can improve the network performance, and consequently, the local caching policy is required to identify popular contents. However, considering the line speed requirement of ICN routers, the local caching policy whose complexity is larger than O(1) cannot be applied. In terms of the replacement policy, Least Recently Used (LRU) is selected as the default one for ICN because of its low complexity, although its ability to identify the popular content is poor. Hence, the identification of popular contents should be completed by the cache permission policy. In this paper, a cache permission policy called Cache-Filter, whose complexity is O(1), is proposed, aiming to store popular contents closer to users. Cache-Filter takes the content popularity into account and achieves the goal through the collaboration of on-path nodes. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of Cache-Filter. Leave Copy Down (LCD), Move Copy Down (MCD), Betw, ProbCache, ProbCache+, Prob(p) and Probabilistic Caching with Secondary List (PCSL) are also implemented for comparison. The results show that Cache-Filter performs well. For example, in terms of the distance to access to contents, compared with Leave Copy Everywhere (LCE) used by Named Data Networking (NDN) as the permission policy, Cache-Filter saves over 17% number of hops.

CAINE: a context-aware information-centric network ecosystem

Information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging networking paradigm that places content identifiers rather than host identifiers at the core of the mechanisms and protocols used to deliver content to end users. Such a paradigm allows routers enhanced with content-awareness to play a direct role in the routing and resolution of content requests from users, without any knowledge of the specific locations of hosted content. However, to facilitate good network traffic engineering and satisfactory user QoS, content routers need to exchange advanced network knowledge to assist them with their resolution decisions. In order to maintain the location-independency tenet of ICNs, such knowledge (known as context information) needs to be independent of the locations of servers. To this end, we propose CAINE — Context-Aware Information-centric Network Ecosystem — which enables context-based operations to be intrinsically supported by the underlying ICN routing and resolution functions. Our approach has been designed to maintain the location-independence philosophy of ICNs by associating context information directly to content rather than to the physical entities such as servers and network elements in the content ecosystem, while ensuring scalability. Through simulation, we show that based on such location-independent context information, CAINE is able to facilitate traffic engineering in the network, while not posing a significant control signalling burden on the network.