Multipath Forwarding Strategy Research Articles

Cache management for large data transfers and multipath forwarding strategies in Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising approach to provide fast in-network access to compact muon solenoid (CMS) datasets. It proposes a content-centric rather than a host-centric approach to data retrieval. Data packets with unique and immutable names are retrieved from a content store (CS) using Interest packets. The current NDN architecture relies on forwarding strategies that are only dependent upon on-path caching. Such a design does not take advantage of the cached content available on the adjacent off-path routers in the network, thus reducing data transfer efficiency. In this work, we propose a software-defined, storage-aware routing mechanism that leverages NDN router cache-states, software defined networking (SDN) and multipath forwarding strategies to improve the efficiency of very large data transfers. First, we propose a novel distributed multipath (D-MP) forwarding strategy and enhancements to the NDN Interest forwarding pipeline. In addition, we develop a centralized SDN-enabled control for the multipath forwarding strategy (S-MP), which leverages the global knowledge of NDN network states that distributes Interests efficiently. We perform extensive evaluations of our proposed methods on an at-scale wide area network (WAN) testbed spanning six geographically separated sites. Our proposed solutions easily outperform the existing NDN forwarding strategies. The D-MP strategy results in performance gains ranging between 10.4x to 12.5x over the default NDN implementation without in-network caching, and 12.2x to 18.4x with in-network caching enabled. For S-MP strategy, we demonstrate a performance improvement of 10.6x to 12.6x, and 12.9x to 18.5x, with in-network caching disabled and enabled, respectively. Further, we also present a comprehensive analysis of NDN cache management for large data transfers and propose a novel prefetching mechanism to improve data transfer performance. Due to the inherent capacity limitations of the NDN router caches, we use SDN to provide an intelligent and efficient solution for data distribution and routing across multiple NDN router caches. We demonstrate how software-defined control can be used to partition and distribute large CMS files based on NDN router cache-state knowledge. Further, SDN control will also configure the router forwarding strategy to retrieve CMS data from the network. Our proposed solution demonstrates that the CMS datasets can be retrieved 28%–38% faster from the NDN routers’ caches than existing NDN approaches. Lastly, we develop a prefetching mechanism to improve the transfer performance of files that are not available in the router’s cache.

The research on a Multipath Forwarding Strategy in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless communication signals are unstable, WSN network topology changes frequently, network dynamics are strong, and single path forwarding is difficult to provide high quality of service. A vector address-based end-to-end multi-path forwarding mechanism and path recovery algorithm are proposed. Although a single path cannot continuously guarantee network connection, multiple paths together can provide network connection with high reliability. In this method, the caller applies for and stores multiple relatively independent communication paths, and ranks them for use according to the path cost. The experimental results show that the performance of the above method is significantly improved.

A Responsibility-based Transport Control for Named Data Networking

Transport Control in Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture is a challenging task. The lack of end-to-end communications in this architecture makes traditional, timeout-driven transport control schemes inefficient and wasteful. Hop-by-hop transport control is an alternative solution to tackle this problem that because of the stateful forwarding plan of NDN can be applied more easily than the IP networks. Most existing solutions in this direction assume known link bandwidths and Data packet sizes or require a loop-free multipath forwarding strategy to work well, but these assumptions do not always hold true and there exist no a loop-free multipath forwarding strategy among the existing forwarding strategies for NDN. In this paper, a Responsibility-based Transport Control (RTC) protocol for NDN is proposed. This protocol does not make strong assumptions about the network and avoids looping paths by applying a window-based rate control mechanism and a capacity-aware, multipath forwarding strategy in each face. In RTC, routers maintain a congestion window in each face and decide on accepting or refusing to take responsibility for forwarding of a newly received Interest packet through exchanging three new control packets. These control packets provide reliable information for managing the congestion windows and capacity-aware traffic splitting in routers. They also enable diverse deployment scenarios for NDN such as IP-overly and wireless links. The RTC is implemented in ndnSIM and its capability in managing congestion, achieving high throughput and providing flow fairness are demonstrated through extensive simulations.

An on-demand off-path cache exploration based multipath forwarding strategy

Information-Centric Networking (ICN), such as Named Data Networking (NDN), intrinsically supports multipath forwarding and in-network caching. In order to take full advantage of both multipath forwarding and in-network caching, it requires sophisticated coordination among consumers, publishers and in-network caches for consumers to learn the fine-grained packet-level cache reachability information. The complexity introduced by the coordination as well as the cache organization hinders the full potential of NDN. Network coding enabled NDN architecture, referred to as NC-NDN, was proposed to significantly simplify the coordination design. However, the NC-NDN proposed so far only exploits on-path caches, which leaves much room for performance improvement. This work enhances NC-NDN with an On-demand Off-path Cache Exploration based Multipath Forwarding strategy, dubbed as O2CEMF, to make the best of the multipath forwarding to efficiently utilize off-path cached content. Under O2CEMF, each network node reactively explores nearby off-path cacheswhen consumers begin to request a generation of content and then maintains the reachability information at the more coarse-grained generation level of granularity instead. Then each consumer can simultaneously retrieve diverse content segments from the original content publisher(s) and the explored capable off-path caches. Our experimental studies validate that our proposed O2CEMF strategy improves the content delivery performance in terms of the average cache hit ratio, the average hops that an Interest traverses, and the average time for retrieving content at an affordable cost as compared to that in the present NC-NDN without exploiting off-path caches.

An NDN IoT Content Distribution Model With Network Coding Enhanced Forwarding Strategy for 5G

The challenging requirements of fifth-generation (5G) Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications have motivated a desired need for feasible network architecture, while Named Data Networking (NDN) is a suitable candidate to support the high density IoT applications. To effectively distribute increasingly large volumes of data in large-scale IoT applications, this paper applies network coding techniques into NDN to improve IoT network throughput and efficiency of content delivery for 5G. A probability-based multipath forwarding strategy is designed for network coding to make full use of its potential. To quantify performance benefits of applying network coding in 5G NDN, this paper integrates network coding into a NDN streaming media system implemented in the ndnSIM simulator. The experimental results clearly and fairly demonstrate that considering network coding in 5G NDN can significantly improve the performance, reliability, and QoS. Besides, this is a general solution as it is applicable for most cache approaches. More importantly, our approach has promising potentials in delivering growing IoT applications including high-quality streaming video services.

SDN Orchestration for Next Generation Inter-Networking: A Multipath Forwarding Approach

Increasing trend of peering at Internet exchange points (IXPs) provides a topological and network management advantage to the Internet service providers (ISPs) that is otherwise not possible through individual peering arrangements with their neighboring domains. ISPs keep analyzing potential advantages to peer at geographically diversified IXPs. Increasing degree of multihoming in ISPs requires extensive coordination among ISPs in different roles (access and transit), for mutual benefit. We propose a novel approach to build a conducive inter-networking ambiance for future data centric applications. Our approach exploits edge multiplicity of transit ISPs present across different IXPs to leverage a cross layer coordination between network stack at access ISP subscribers and the network infrastructure. Software defined networking provides a useful apparatus to control IXP fabric and also empowers our multipath forwarding strategy for an optimal network resource utilization in the inter-domain configuration. Contributions of this paper include the derivation of abstracted overlay graph from an IXP centric inter-domain connectivity model. This graph is used to provide multipath forwarding for increased reliability and throughput over abstracted graph. Adaptive cross layer coordination increases the efficiency of the proposed framework and provides an online mechanism of forwarding the traffic across the domains. We have observed as high as 54% increase in throughput using proposed scheme as compared with single path routing and forwarding strategy currently employed at the Internet backbone.