Information-Centric Networking Research Articles

Distributed Region-Based Monitoring in Low-Power Listening Wireless Sensor Networks

Advancement in IoT technology and the concept of Information-Centric Networking lead to less importance of node individuality since several nodes can work interchangeably. Multiple sensor nodes can be grouped into a region and monitored as one instance to guarantee su°cient coverage over the region. Therefore, a single node fault often does not need to be reported unless it is the last node in the region. In addition, applications focusing on detecting rare events rarely require nodes to transmit and often rely on a low-power listening MAC protocols, where nodes spend most of their time sleeping but require signi˝cantly more work during transmission. In such situations it is desirable to avoid periodic status reports transmitted to the central monitor station as usually found in a centralized monitoring scheme. A distributed region-based monitoring scheme, or DRMON, is then proposed to facilitate this circumstance. This approach designates a representative to each region so that it can be used as an indicator of the region's status with a mechanism to re-elect a new representative until all nodes in the respective region are dead, implying region inactiveness. We evaluate the suitability of DRMON over various scenarios in two aspects: centralized vs. distributed monitoring schemes and individual-based vs. region-based monitoring schemes, along with existing work in the literature. Simulation results indicate that region-based schemes outperform the individual schemes in terms of power consumption and scalability when the number of regions is low. The distributed schemes also yield better e°-ciency in terms of message overhead. Compared against the other schemes, DRMON's overall power consumption is reduced by 4%-10%, with 66%- 88% reduction in packet transmissions, while maintaining fault detection precision and recall of greater than 90% and the detection delay within an acceptable range. This outcome suggests that in the case where existence of individual node is out of concern, distributed region-based fault monitoring scheme could be employed to reduce energy usage and lower message overhead while retaining acceptable detection accuracy.

Adjacency-Information-Entropy-Based Cooperative Name Resolution Approach in ICN

Information-centric networking (ICN) is an emerging network architecture that has the potential to address low-transmission latency and high-reliability requirements in the fifth generation and beyond communication networks (5G/B5G). In the ICN architectures that use the identifier–locator separation mode, a name resolution system (NRS) is an important infrastructure for managing and maintaining the mappings between identifiers and locators. To meet the demands of time-sensitive applications, researchers have developed a distributed local NRS that can provide name resolution service within deterministic latency, which means it can respond to a name resolution request within a latency upper bound. However, processing name resolution requests only locally cannot take full advantage of the potential of the distributed local NRS. In this paper, we propose a name resolution approach, called adjacency-information-entropy-based cooperative name resolution (ACNR). In ACNR, when a name resolution node receives a name resolution request from a user, it can use neighboring name resolution nodes to respond to this request in a parallel processing manner. For this purpose, ACNR uses the information entropy that takes into account the adjacency and latency between name resolution nodes to describe the local structure of nodes efficiently. The proposed approach is extensively validated on simulated networks. Compared with several other approaches, the experiment results show that ACNR can discover more cooperative neighbors in a reasonable communication overhead, and achieve a higher name resolution success rate.

RAFT: Congestion control technique for efficient information dissemination in ICN based VANET

Vehicular communications contain a massive number of nodes with a high mobility rate moving between the network connectivity to connect and disconnect the network rapidly. With the increasing demand and services, many information packets are generated and forwarded between “vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I)”. This will result in a congestion problem, which increases the delay and sometimes the loss of packets. It is a severe problem in VANET, wherein urban areas, a large number of nodes present in network with rapid mobility and dynamic topology. We proposed a network-aware solution called RAFT in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) connected with Information-Centric Networks architecture to address these problems. We can solve the congestion problem at two levels at level one by effectively managing the network’s available recourses. In level two, we prioritize data for effective data dissemination. The balance between the available to consumed recourse will improve the network’s throughput, lessen delay, and improve the data dissemination rate. We have validated our proposed work with the simulation of ICN based VANET using ndnSIM.

An Efficient Distributed Content Store-Based Caching Policy for Information-Centric Networking.

Content store (CS) is one of the main components of information-centric networking (ICN), which enables content objects to be cached and retrieved from any intermediate node in the network. However, in existing ICN designs, CS information is not exploited to coordinate content caching and content retrieval. CS of nodes in the network operates independently while Interest packets forwarding mainly uses forwarding information base (FIB). This paper highlights the importance of CS information for efficient content caching and content retrieval to improve the performance of information-centric networking, especially in resource-constrained environments like the Internet of Things. We propose an efficient caching policy to coordinate the CS of a node with its neighbor nodes in a distributed manner so that more and more popular content objects are cached in the neighborhood of the node. To exploit and coordinate CS information among nodes, we urge to enable CS information in the data plane of the network and design an efficient way for CS information transmission. Each node contributes to the objective of its neighborhood by maximizing its number of unique popular content objects being cached in its CS and not cached in the CS of its neighbors. We implement the proposed policy on top of state-of-the-art popularity-based caching schemes. Through analysis and experiments, we show that the proposed caching policy achieves a significant improvement in terms of cache hit ratio, stretch ratio, content retrieval latency, and energy efficiency significantly compared to state-of-the-art schemes.

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.

Forwarding in Energy-Constrained Wireless Information Centric Networks.

Information Centric Networks (ICNs) have been considered one of the most promising candidates to overcome the disadvantages of host-centric architectures when applied to IoT networks, having the potential to address the challenges of a smart city. One of the foundations of a smart city is its sensory capacity, which is obtained through devices associated with the IoT concept. The more sensors spread out, the greater the ability to sense the city. However, such a scale demands high energy requirements and an effective improvement in the energy management is unavoidable. To improve the energy management, we are proposing an efficient forwarding scheme in energy-constrained wireless ICNs. To achieve this goal, we consider the type of devices, their internal energy and the network context, among other parameters. The proposed forwarding strategy extends and adapts concepts of ICNs, by means of packet domain analysis, neighbourhood evaluation and node sleeping and waking strategies. The proposed solution takes advantage of the neighbourhood to be aware of the moments to listen and forward packets in order to consistently address mobility, improving the quality of content delivery. The evaluation is performed by simulation with real datasets of urban mobility, one from the lagoon of “Ria de Aveiro” and the other from a vehicular network in the city of Porto. The results show that the proposed forwarding scheme resulted in significant improvements in network content availability, in the overall energy saving and, consequently, in the network lifetime.

Mobility-Aware Proactive Edge Caching Optimization Scheme in Information-Centric IoV Networks.

Edge caching is a promising approach to alleviate the burden on the backhaul of network links. It has a significant role in the Internet of Vehicle (IoV) networks performance by providing cached data at the edge and reduce the burden of the core network caused by the number of participating vehicles and data volume. However, due to the limited computing and storage capabilities of edge devices, it is hard to guarantee that all contents are cached and every requirement of the device are satisfied for all users. In this paper, we design an Information-Centric Network (ICN) with mobility-aware proactive caching scheme to provide delay-sensitive services on IoV networks. The real-time status and interaction of vehicles with other vehicles and Roadside Units (RSU) is modeled using a Markov process. Mobility aware proactive edge caching decision that maximize network performance while minimizing transmission delay is applied. Our numerical simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms related caching schemes in terms of latency by 20–25% in terms of latency and by 15–23% in cache hits.

Industrial product design method using feature expression and multi‐view learning in ICN

In order to realize multi‐layer semantic integration and innovation of complex product industrial design, promote multi‐disciplinary knowledge sharing and coordination, and improve product quality, the hierarchical semantic concept of product industrial design is put forward based on the theories of product semiotics and cognitive semantics. In addition, the hierarchical semantic industrial design process context model is constructed based on complex product development process and information processing theory using the Information Centric Networking (ICN) technology, since ICN architecture can be used to optimize the product quality. In the ICN environment, the scientific semantic expression methods and the artistic semantic expression method of product semantics are also used to extract features and construct the feature expression in the specific design situation. The icon semantic features, indicative semantic features, symbolic semantic features and their relevance of complex products are obtained. Experimental results have been achieved and shown that the proposed method has benefits than the other methods.

ICN‐Oriented secure propagation for smart ideology and politics

Besides the in‐network caching, Information‐Centric Networking (ICN) has also an obvious feature, that is, security distribution which could guarantee that all contents are retrieved correctly. As we know, Smart Ideology and Politics (SIP) has gained great attention from some research centers so as to ensure the national security, this is because there are many unreliable propagations on SIP. In order to realize the secure propagation for SIP, the security distribution feature of ICN could be exploited. Therefore, this letter proposes ICN‐oriented Secure Propagation for SIP, called ISP4S, including two major parts. At first, ICN network paradigm is employed to build a bran‐new infrastructures. Then, for SIP, the differential privacy protection method is proposed to construct the corresponding secure propagation paths. For the proposed ISP4S, some simulations based on ICN environment are made to verify its efficiency, and the experimental results demonstrate that ISP4S outperforms the selected baselines.

Re-routing with ant colony optimization for information-centric networks

Re-routing with ant colony optimization for information-centric networks

A Single-Rate Multicast Congestion Control (SRMCC) Mechanism in Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking (ICN) is expected to be a candidate for future internet architecture, and it supports features such as multicast that improves bandwidth utilization and transmission efficiency. However, multicast itself does not provide congestion control. When multiple multicast groups coexist, multicast traffic may exhaust all network resources, and cause network congestion and packet loss. Additionally, traditional IP multicast congestion control mechanisms cannot be directly applied to ICN architecture. Therefore, it is necessary to consider an effective congestion control mechanism for ICN multicast. This paper proposes a single-rate multicast congestion control mechanism, called SRMCC. It supports router-assisted awareness of the network congestion state and congestion control message aggregation. Moreover, the fair shared rate estimation method is innovatively proposed to achieve protocol fairness. Most importantly, it adjusts the rate according to different congestion states indicated by the queue occupancy ratio. By introducing a rate selection factor, it can achieve a balance between packet loss rate and throughput. Experimental results show that our proposal outperforms other mechanisms in throughput, packet loss rate, total bandwidth utilization, and overhead, and achieves protocol fairness and better TCP friendliness.

Time-Sensitive Satellite Internet Based on Uniform Content Labels

For satellite Internet the content was examined by location and time of day, as well as within the context of online social networks. The ground Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a paradigm shift from host-to-host Internet Protocol (IP)-based communication to content-based communication. With the development and universal application of satellite technology, an important way to expand the function of satellites is setting up inter-satellite networks to make them work together. The Internet and the Global Positioning System are based on the dual structure network and the Uniform Content Label UCL national standard. Through the integration of these two inventions, the integration of time and space is realized, creating an endogenous security environment of both mathematics and physics that is self-consistent in cyberspace, is expected to bring a breakthrough in principle for cracking network security challenges.

An Active Path-Associated Cache Scheme for Mobile Scenes

With the widespread growth of mass content, information-centric networks (ICN) have become one of the research hotspots of future network architecture. One of the important features of ICN is ubiquitous in-network caching. In recent years, the explosive growth of mobile devices has brought content dynamics, which poses a new challenge to the original ICN caching mechanism. This paper focuses on the WiFi mobile scenario of ICN. We design a new path-associated active caching scheme to shorten the time delay of users obtaining content to enhance the user experience. In this article, based on the WiFi scenario, we first propose a solution for neighbor access point selection from a theoretical perspective, considering the caching cost and transition probability. The cache content is then forwarded based on the selected neighbor set. For cached content, we propose content freshness according to mobile characteristics and consider content popularity at the same time. For cache nodes, we focus on the size of the remaining cache space and the number of hops from the cache to the user. We have implemented this strategy based on the value of caching on the forwarding path. The simulation results show that our caching strategy has a significant improvement in performance compared with active caching and other caching strategies.

An Energy Reward-Based Caching Mechanism for Information-Centric Internet of Things.

Existing information-centric networking (ICN) designs for Internet of Things (IoT) mostly make caching decisions based on probability or content popularity. From the energy-efficient perspective, those strategies may not always be energy efficient in resource-constrained IoT because without considering the energy reward of caching decisions, inappropriate routers and content objects may be selected for caching, which may lead to negative energy rewards. In this paper, we analyze the energy consumption of content caching and content retrieval in resource-constrained IoT and calculate caching energy reward as a key metric to measure the energy efficiency of a caching decision. We then propose an efficient cache placement and cache replacement mechanism based on the caching energy reward to improve the energy efficiency of caching decisions. Through analysis and experimental results, we show that the proposed mechanism achieves a significant improvement in terms of energy efficiency, stretch ratio, and cache hit ratio compared to state-of-the-art caching schemes.

Energy-Efficient Cooperative Caching for Information-Centric Wireless Sensor Networking

Although information-centric networking (ICN) can boost the performance of sensor data delivery in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), its energy efficiency may be significantly impaired due to the receiver-driven request-response transmission model. ICN sensors have to keep long-time active mode to wait for the requests that may arrive at any time, resulting nontrivial energy waste for energy-constrained WSNs. An intuitive method to conserve energy is to schedule partial nodes to fall asleep, but at the cost of extra data fetching delay. In this work, we investigate multihop cooperative caching for green WSN over receiver-driven ICNs. By leveraging regional caches, not only can the energy be saved, but also the data fetching delay can be reduced. We formulate those two cooperation gains and capture the tradeoff between energy saving and delay reduction. Based on the optimal tradeoff, we present a solution of scoped multihop cooperative caching and elaborate a green cooperation policy for each sensor to determine its operation scope and conduct a proper cooperation decision. Our simulation results show that our proposed multihop cooperative caching can save more than 91.0% energy and achieve 28.9% delay reduction than the basic ICWSN, and also reduce 60.2% energy consumption than the existing cooperative caching schemes.

PB-NCC: A Popularity-Based Caching Strategy with Number-of-Copies Control in Information-Centric Networks

The Information-Centric Network (ICN), designed for efficient content acquisition and distribution, is a promising candidate architecture for the future Internet. In-network caching in ICN makes it possible to reuse contents and the Name Resolution System (NRS) makes cached contents better serve users. In this paper, we focused on the ICN caching scenario equipped with an NRS, which records the positions of contents cached in ICN. We propose a Popularity-based caching strategy with Number-of-Copies Control (PB-NCC) in this paper. PB-NCC is proposed to solve the problems of unreasonable content distribution and frequent cache replacement in traditional caching strategies in ICN. We examine PB-NCC with a large number of experiments in different topologies and workloads. The simulation results reveal that PB-NCC can improve the cache hit ratio by at least 8.85% and reduce the server load by at least 11.34% compared with other on-path caching strategies, meanwhile maintaining a low network latency.

An approach for FIB construction and Interest packet forwarding in information centric network

Routing protocol in Information Centric Network (ICN) prepares Forward Information Base (FIB) and routing table to assist the process of content retrieval. The content seeker generates Interest packets for the desired content and the routing module forwards it to the right store. One of the challenging tasks in ICN is to design an efficient FIB construction mechanism to improve the performance by adequately forwarding Interest packets to the right store of data. The focus of this manuscript is to address the said challenge of FIB construction and Interest forwarding. First, we propose a scheme for FIB construction from the information communicated through content advertisement. Then, an Interest packet forwarding scheme is presented for faster retrieval of the searched content. The FIB construction is governed by Bloom Filter (BF) enabled content advertisement and the Interest forwarding is guided by information gradient. The proposed scheme is simulated in ndnSim −2.0 and results are compared with both contemporary BF and non-BF based approaches. Parameters such as FIB convergence rate, control overhead, FIB and routing table size, false positive rate, content retrieval delay and Interest success rate are perceived. The experiment shows that the proposed scheme performs better than other approaches. Quantitatively, compared to other protocols, the proposed scheme performs better around 10%–25% in convergence rate, more than 50% in network load, and around 30%–45% in content retrieval delay.

Self-protected content for information-centric networking architectures using verifiable credentials

Self-protected content for information-centric networking architectures using verifiable credentials

An Efficient Probe-Based Routing for Content-Centric Networking.

With the development of new technologies and applications, such as the Internet of Things, smart cities, 5G, and edge computing, traditional Internet Protocol-based (IP-based) networks have been exposed as having many problems. Information-Centric Networking (ICN), Named Data Networking (NDN), and Content-Centric Networking (CCN) are therefore proposed as an alternative for future networks. However, unlike IP-based networks, CCN routing is non-deterministic and difficult to optimize due to frequent in-network caching replacement. This paper presents a novel probe-based routing algorithm that explores real-time in-network caching to ensure the routing table storing the optimal paths to the nearest content provider is up to date. Effective probe-selections, Pending Interest Table (PIT) probe, and Forwarding Information Base (FIB) probe are discussed and analyzed by simulation with different performance measurements. Compared with the basic CCN, in terms of qualitative analysis, the additional computational overhead of our approach is O(NCS + Nrt + NFIB ∗ NSPT) and O(NFIB) on processing interest packets and data packets, respectively. However, in terms of quantitative analysis, our approach reduces the number of timeout interests by 6% and the average response time by 0.6 s. Furthermore, although basic CCN and our approach belong to the same Quality of Service (QoS) category, our approach outperforms basic CCN in terms of real values. Additionally, our probe-based approach performs better than RECIF+PIF and EEGPR. Owing to speedup FIB updating by probes, our approach provides more reliable interest packet routing when accounting for router failures. In summary, the results demonstrate that compared to basic CCN, our probe-based routing approach raises FIB accuracy and reduces network congestion and response time, resulting in efficient routing.

Integration of ICN and MEC in 5G and Beyond Networks: Mutual Benefits, Use Cases, Challenges, Standardization, and Future Research

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is a novel edge computing paradigm that moves cloud-based processing and storage capabilities closer to the mobile users by implementing server resources in the access nodes. MEC helps fulfill the stringent requirements of 5G and beyond networks to offer anytime-anywhere connectivity for many devices with ultra-low delay and huge bandwidths. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is another prominent network technology that builds on a content-centric network architecture to overcome host-centric routing/operation shortcomings and to realize efficient pervasive and ubiquitous networking. It is envisaged to be employed in Future Internet including Beyond 5G (B5G) networks. The consolidation of ICN with MEC technology offers new opportunities to realize that vision and serve advanced use cases. However, various integration challenges are yet to be addressed to enable the wide-scale co-deployment of ICN with MEC in future networks. In this paper, we discuss and elaborate on ICN MEC integration to provide a comprehensive survey with a forward-looking perspective for Beyond 5G networks. In that regard, we deduce lessons learned from related works (for both 5G and Beyond 5G networks). We present ongoing standardization activities to highlight practical implications of such efforts. Moreover, we render key B5G use cases and highlight the role for ICN MEC integration for addressing their requirements. Finally, we layout research challenges and identify potential research directions. For this last contribution, we also provide a mapping of the latter to ICN integration challenges and use cases.