Information-centric Service Research Articles

An Adaptive Hierarchical Hybrid Multicast Based on Information-Centric Networking

Many information-centric services have emerged, such as IPTV and video conferencing. These services put a lot of demands on scalable multicast communication. However, traditional IP multicast has low adoption because of its poor scalability. Therefore, some stateless multicast methods were proposed, which encapsulate the destination’s information into the packet header without requiring routers to maintain the multicast forwarding state. However, stateless multicast also faces some problems, such as ingress router overload, high forwarding overhead, packet redundancy, etc. In addition, most multicast methods cannot optimize the multicast tree because the multicast flow is simply forwarded along the shortest path tree from the source to receivers. This paper proposes an Adaptive Hierarchical Hybrid Multicast (AHHM) based on Information-Centric Networking. To balance the forwarding states and forwarding overhead, AHHM is designed as a two-layer structure, in which the upper layer establishes a stateful main tree and the lower layer establishes several stateless sub trees. The router on the main tree is defined as the multicast join node (MJN), and AHHM uses the Name Resolution System to maintain the mapping between each multicast group name and corresponding MJNs. To optimize the multicast transmission path, we designed the minimum cost selection strategy for users to select the appropriate MJN to join. Simulation results show that compared with Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) and Bit Index Explicit Replication (BIER), AHHM can not only reduce the multicast forwarding states but also reduce the control overhead and link load.

An adaptive duty-cycle mechanism for energy efficient wireless sensor networks, based on information centric networking design

The information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging paradigm that grounds networking primitives on content names rather than node locators (as in the current Internet). ICN targets seamless mobility, native muticast/multipath support, and content oriented security to better reflect the needs of today users. ICN could greatly improve the efficiency of content delivery also in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A WSN typically provides information centric services: in fact, whenever a mote is queried, the asking user is interested to the information acquired by the sensors on top of that mote rather than establishing a point-to-point remote communication. In this manuscript, without lack of generality, we will focus on a particular type of ICN architecture, known as content centric networking (CCN). In such a context, we place our attention on the energy efficiency of forwarding, which is achieved via costly broadcasting. Our objective is to save energy while achieving a high user satisfaction rate. In CCN, when a node requests a content, it sends an interest message and the node with the corresponding content replies with a Content Object message. To enable CCN features, each node maintains three tables: a Content Store to cache contents; a Forwarding Interest Base to store forwarded interests and a Pending Interest Table (PIT) to record unsatisfied interests. In this work, we start by introducing the features of CCN in WSNs and the advantages that it brings. For the forwarding optimization, we come up with an ‘Adaptive and fully Distributed Duty-Cycle for Content-Centric Wireless Sensor Network’ (ADDC-CCWSN) mechanism. ADDC-CCWSN aims to reduce the activity of nodes with a high percentage of unsatisfied interests in their PIT. We argue that the approach can be applied (with some modifications) to any ICN architecture that works as a network of caches in pull mode. We also propose an analytical model for CCN-WSNs to examine the energy consumption of content delivery. In addition, we implement the proposed mechanism on Contiki and, through extensive simulations with Cooja, we demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant gain of energy efficiency compared to a CCN approach with mostly-on sensor nodes while ensuring a high interest satisfaction rate and keeping nearly the same delay.

Taming the IoT data deluge: An innovative information-centric service model for fog computing applications

Fog Computing is a new computation paradigm, recently emerged from the convergence of IoT, WSN, mobile computing, edge computing, and Cloud Computing, which is particularly well suited for Smart City environments. Fog Computing aims at supporting the development of time-sensitive, location-, social-, and context-aware applications by using computational resources in close proximity of information producers and consumers, such as increasingly common cheap and powerful modern hardware platforms. However, realizing Fog Computing solutions for Smart Cities represents a very challenging task, because of the massive amount of data to process, the strict resource and time constraints, and the significant dynamicity and heterogeneity of computation and network resources. These formidable challenges suggest taking into consideration new information and service model solutions that explore several trade-offs between processing speed and accuracy. Along these guidelines, we designed the SPF Fog-as-a-Service platform, which proposes a new information-centric and utility-based service model and allows the definition of self-adaptive and composition-friendly services, which can execute either on edge devices or in the Cloud. In numerous evaluations, SPF proved to be a very effective platform for running Fog services on heterogeneous devices with significantly different computational capabilities while also demonstrating remarkable ease of development and management characteristics.

Information centric services in Smart Cities

HighlightsWe propose a service platform for Smart City based on the emerging ICN paradigm.The platform offers an efficient interface between service and technology layers.We designed the service ex...

Information centric services in Smart Cities

A “Smart City” is intended as an urban environment which, supported by pervasive ICT systems, is able to offer advanced and innovative services to citizens in order to improve the overall quality of their life. In this context, the present contribution formulates a pioneering proposal, by drawing an advanced information centric platform for supporting the typical ICT services of a Smart City. It can easily embrace all available and upcoming wireless technologies, while enforcing, at the same time, ubiquitous and secure applications in many domains, such as, e-government and public administration, intelligent transportation systems, public safety, social, health-care, educational, building and urban planning, environmental, and energy and water management applications. All the details of the proposed approach have been carefully described by means of pragmatical use-cases, such as the management of administrative procedures, the starting of a new business in a given country, the navigation assistance, the signaling of an urban accident aimed at improving the public safety, the reservation of a medical examination, the remote assistance of patients, and the management of waste in a city. This description makes evident the real effectiveness of the present proposal in future urban environments.

Enabling portability in advanced information-centric services over structured peer-to-peer systems

A common factor among all the existing distributed, peer-to-peer systems is their lack of genericity. Typically, information-centric services (such as range queries) are deployed ad-hoc onto a specific peer-to-peer overlay. These kinds of solutions make them probably efficient but non-portable to other peer-to-peer infrastructures, and so the services and applications constructed over them. We do believe, instead, that a peer-to-peer-generic solution is feasible. In this paper, we tackle the genericity and portability issue specifically on structured peer-to-peer networks (SPNs). To do so, we introduce a distributed 3-layer architecture, which abstracts applications (on top of the architecture) and the peer-to-peer network currently in use (in the bottom layer). Our middleware appears in the middle layer, which is responsible to address two major challenges: (i) supporting complex, multi-dimensional application data domains and (ii) performing efficiently for a wide variety of information-centric services in the large scale. Broadly speaking, information-centric services are classified as data management (such as range or spatial queries) and content distribution services (like publish/subscribe), and our middleware is an umbrella for all them. Notice that data management services are based on the pull mode (i.e., a user lookups information previously stored in the system), whilst content distribution services obey to a push mode (i.e., the system delivers the information timely to users). The benefits of our approach are clear: (i) Our middleware can be easily deployed over existing SPNs, guaranteeing the portability of a critical mass of services and end-user applications; (ii) Several services can be added to the middleware, which will facilitate the appearance of new synergies; and (iii) our middleware deals with the application data domain transparently to services and applications, including the necessary algorithms for services to be efficiently deployed into our middleware.