Name-based Routing Research Articles

Controller-driven vector autoregression model for predicting content popularity in programmable named data networking devices.

Named Data Networking (NDN) has emerged as a promising network architecture for content delivery in edge infrastructures, primarily due to its name-based routing and integrated in-network caching. Despite these advantages, sub-optimal performance often results from the decentralized decision-making processes of caching devices. This article introduces a paradigm shift by implementing a Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller to optimize the placement of highly popular content in NDN nodes. The optimization process considers critical networking factors, including network congestion, security, topology modification, and flowrules alterations, which are essential for shaping content caching strategies. The article presents a novel content caching framework, Popularity-aware Caching in Popular Programmable NDN nodes (PaCPn). Employing a multi-variant vector autoregression (VAR) model driven by an SDN controller, PaCPn periodically updates content popularity based on time-series data, including 'request rates' and 'past popularity'. It also introduces a controller-driven heuristic algorithm that evaluates the proximity of caching points to consumers, considering factors such as 'distance cost,' 'delivery time,' and the specific 'status of the requested content'. PaCPn utilizes customized DATA named packets to ensure the source stores content with a valid residual freshness period while preventing intermediate nodes from caching it. The experimental results demonstrate significant improvements achieved by the proposed technique PaCPn compared to existing schemes. Specifically, the technique enhances cache hit rates by 20% across various metrics, including cache size, Zipf parameter, and exchanged traffic within edge infrastructure. Moreover, it reduces content retrieval delays by 28%, considering metrics such as cache capacity, the number of consumers, and network throughput. This research advances NDN content caching and offers potential optimizations for edge infrastructures.

DINNRS: A Distributed In-Network Name Resolution System for information-centric networks

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promising network paradigm designed to address the challenges arising from the inherent ambiguity of IP addresses. ICN prioritizes the content itself as the main factor in network transmission. The Name Resolution System (NRS) is the primary component of the ICN architecture, relying on flat naming. Unfortunately, existing NRS frequently encounters scalability and performance issues. In this paper, we present the Distributed In-Network Name Resolution System (DINNRS), an NRS that leverages the software-defined networking and ICN paradigm. DINNRS offers global-scale name-based routing with high scalability and minimal request delay. Additionally, we propose a modular control domain architecture for easy implementation and an enhanced marked cuckoo filter for fast resolving. Simulation experiments using the ICN emulator demonstrate that our methods result in significant performance gains, with a 61.2% reduction in data acquire latency and a 55.2% lower link load control overhead compared to MDHT.

Decentralized Receiver-based Link Stability-aware Forwarding Scheme for NDN-based VANETs

The inter-vehicle communication in the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) providing ubiquitous mobility to mobile users is considered an essential component of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), enabling a wide range of safety and non-safety applications in which the vehicles seamlessly interact and co-operate with each other. The recent paradigm shift in VANETs protocols has led to the adoption of name data networking (NDN) as an underlying communication protocol in VANETs that replaces traditional address-based communication philosophy, treats content as a first-class citizen, and assigns unique names to contents consequently enabling name-based routing and forwarding, caching, and security. Although NDN has significantly improved the underlying communication issues in VANETs, a plethora of challenges such as message broadcast storms, in-efficient packet suppression mechanisms, intermittent connectivity owing to frequent topological changes, and reverse path partioning (RPP) require further attention from the research community. To cope with these issues, this paper proposes decentralized receiver-based link stability-aware forwarding (DRLSF) protocol. The DRLSF is a beacon-less receiver-based multi-hop protocol, well-suited for pull-based applications where end users request desired data by sending packets. The comparative performance analysis validates the effectiveness of the DRLSF protocol in different VANET environments and application scenarios.

Lightweight Transmission Behavior Audit Scheme for NDN Industrial Internet Identity Resolution and Transmission Based on Blockchain

The Named Data Network (NDN) enables efficient content dissemination through interest-based retrieval, name-based routing, and content caching. In the industrial Internet architecture based on NDN, device identity distribution, identification, resolution, and routing rely on identification resolution technology. However, this approach presents challenges such as cache poisoning, interest packet flood attacks, and black hole attacks. Existing security schemes primarily focused on routing forwarding and verification fail to address critical concerns, including routing environment credibility and data leakage, while exhibiting poor time and space efficiency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a lightweight behavior auditing scheme using blockchain technology. The scheme utilizes an improved Bloom filter to compress behavioral information like interest and data packets during the identification transmission process. The compressed data are subsequently uploaded to a blockchain for auditing, achieving efficient space and time utilization while maintaining feasibility.

NDN-BDA: A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Data Authentication Mechanism for Vehicular Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) is an implementation of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) that has emerged as a promising candidate for the Future Internet Architecture (FIA). In contrast to traditional networking protocols, NDN’s focus is on content, rather than the source of the content. NDN enables name-based routing and location-independent data retrieval, which gives NDN the ability to support the highly dynamic nature of mobile networks. Among other important features, NDN integrates security mechanisms and prioritizes protecting content over communication channels through cryptographic signatures. However, the data verification process that NDN employs may cause significant delays, especially in mobile networks and vehicular networks. This aspect makes it unsuitable for time-critical and sensitive applications such as the sharing of safety messages. Therefore, in this work, we propose NDN-BDA, a blockchain-based decentralized mechanism that provides a faster and more efficient data authenticity mechanism for NDN-based vehicular networks.

Interest Flooding Attacks in Named Data Networking: Survey of Existing Solutions, Open Issues, Requirements, and Future Directions

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a prominent realization of the vision of Information-Centric Networking. The NDN architecture adopts name-based routing and location-independent data retrieval. Among other important features, NDN integrates security mechanisms and focuses on protecting the content rather than the communications channels. Along with a new architecture come new threats, and NDN is no exception. NDN is a potential target for new network attacks such as Interest Flooding Attacks (IFAs). Attackers take advantage of IFA to launch (D)DoS attacks in NDN. Many IFA detection and mitigation solutions have been proposed in the literature. However, there is no comprehensive review study of these solutions that has been proposed so far. Therefore, in this article, we propose a survey of the various IFAs with a detailed comparative study of all the relevant proposed solutions as counter-measures against IFAs. We also review the requirements for a complete and efficient IFA solution and pinpoint the various issues encountered by IFA detection and mitigation mechanisms through a series of attack scenarios. Finally, in this survey, we offer an analysis of the open issues and future research directions regarding IFAs.

Popularity-Aware Closeness Based Caching in NDN Edge Networks.

By enabling name-based routing and ubiquitous in-network caching, Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising network architecture for sixth generation (6G) edge network infrastructures. However, the performance of content retrieval largely depends on the selected caching strategy, which is implemented in a distributed fashion by each NDN node. Previous research showed the effectiveness of caching decisions based on content popularity and network topology information. This paper presents a new distributed caching strategy for NDN edge networks based on a metric called popularity-aware closeness (PaC), which measures the proximity of the potential cacher to the majority of requesters of a certain content. After identifying the most popular contents, the strategy caches them in the available edge nodes that guarantee the higher PaC. Achieved simulation results show that the proposed strategy outperforms other benchmark schemes, in terms of reduced content retrieval delay and exchanged data traffic.

A Content Dissemination Technique Based on Priority to Improve Quality of Service of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Due to the ability of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) to improve mobility and create innovative services, they have received increasing attention from both industry and academia fields. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a network service that has been developed for Internet’s host-based packet delivery model. In VANETs, NDN is used as an emerging architecture for improving the quality of service (QoS) of the networks connected cloud and mobile Internet of Things (IoT). We can achieve this improvement using an efficient content dissemination and forwarding technique that depends on name-based routing, in-network content caching, and interest-based content retrieval. The large amount of data processed by several IoT sensors or nodes of VANETs makes content prioritizing and forwarding mechanism is crucial, especially when many end-users need common content simultaneously. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a content dissemination technique based on priority for boosting the service requirements of NDN-based cloud and mobile IoT nodes in the VANETs. The approach prioritizes the data flow of traffic into four classes: urgent, emergency, least, and average using a novel constrained location and deadline method, called New method employing Deadline Distance and Size of Data (NDDS). The highest priority is assigned to the data traffic with the emergency class, then urgent, average, and least class. To evaluate this proposed technique, a numerical simulation experiment is conducted by using the CloudSim toolkit. The simulation results demonstrate that the emergency data flow has minimum processing time, compared to the average, urgent, and least data flow, which can significantly enhance the QoS of NDN protocol-based Ad Hoc networks.

Survey and taxonomy of information-centric vehicular networking security attacks

Information Centric Networks (ICNs) overcome the current IP-based networks weakness and aim to ensure efficient data distribution. The Main ICN features are location-independent naming, in-network caching, name-based routing, built-in security, and high mobility. ICN vehicular networks stratify the ICN architecture on the Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) to reinforce a massive amount of data transmission and handle the critical time interests inside the vehicular networks while taking into consideration the vehicles’ high mobility.Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) gather the real-time data from the vehicular networks to build their own platforms and figure out new features serving autonomous vehicles, vehicle safety, and traffic management. This introduces new vulnerabilities through the vehicles’ interaction with the outside networks. Accordingly, it is important to understand the VANETs’ attacks to fulfill the security goals. In this paper, we survey the different attacks on VANETs and ICN, and focus on the newly introduced attacks in the integrated platform between ICN and VANETs. We propose a taxonomy for ICN vehicular attacks. In addition, evaluate the attacks and identify their security levels.

Delay-Based Network Utility Maximization Modelling for Congestion Control in Named Data Networking

Content replication and name-based routing lead to a natural multi-source and multipath transmission paradigm in NDN. Due to the unique connectionless characteristic of NDN, current end-to-end multipath congestion control schemes (e.g. MPTCP) cannot be used directly on NDN. This paper proposes a Network Utility Maximization (NUM) model to formulate multi-source and multipath transmission in NDN with in-network caches. From this model, a family of receiver-driven transmission solutions can be derived, named as path-specified congestion control. The path-specified congestion control enables content consumers to separate the traffic control on each path, which consequently facilitates fair and efficient bandwidth sharing amongst all consumers. As a specific instance, a Delay-based Path-specified Congestion Control Protocol (DPCCP) is presented, which utilizes queuing delays as signals to measure and control congestion levels of different bottlenecks. In addition, a set of high-performance congestion control laws are designed to accelerate bandwidth and fairness convergence towards the optimum defined by the NUM model. Finally, DPCCP is compared with state-of-the-art solutions. The experimental evaluations show that DPCCP outperforms existing solutions in terms of bandwidth utilization, convergence time and packet loss.

Detection of malicious consumer interest packet with dynamic threshold values.

As a promising next-generation network architecture, named data networking (NDN) supports name-based routing and in-network caching to retrieve content in an efficient, fast, and reliable manner. Most of the studies on NDN have proposed innovative and efficient caching mechanisms and retrieval of content via efficient routing. However, very few studies have targeted addressing the vulnerabilities in NDN architecture, which a malicious node can exploit to perform a content poisoning attack (CPA). This potentially results in polluting the in-network caches, the routing of content, and consequently isolates the legitimate content in the network. In the past, several efforts have been made to propose the mitigation strategies for the content poisoning attack, but to the best of our knowledge, no specific work has been done to address an emerging attack-surface in NDN, which we call an interest flooding attack. Handling this attack-surface can potentially make content poisoning attack mitigation schemes more effective, secure, and robust. Hence, in this article, we propose the addition of a security mechanism in the CPA mitigation scheme that is, Name-Key Based Forwarding and Multipath Forwarding Based Inband Probe, in which we block the malicious face of compromised consumers by monitoring the Cache-Miss Ratio values and the Queue Capacity at the Edge Routers. The malicious face is blocked when the cache-miss ratio hits the threshold value, which is adjusted dynamically through monitoring the cache-miss ratio and queue capacity values. The experimental results show that we are successful in mitigating the vulnerability of the CPA mitigation scheme by detecting and blocking the flooding interface, at the cost of very little verification overhead at the NDN Routers.

Cooperative Caching Scheme for Machine-to-Machine Information-Centric IoT Networks

Information-centric networks (ICNs), a foreseen future Internet architecture, are focusing on the content itself rather than its hosting location. With this, the existing Internet protocol (IP)-based host-centric communication model can be transformed into a content-centric communication model with the support of in-network caching, name-based routing, and location-independent content domain names. Recently, ICN is proposed to be a potential Internet architecture for Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks due to minimal retrieval delays and reduced load on the data producer. Content retrieval from IoT nodes plays a prominent role in enhancing the performance of the ICN-IoT networks. State-of-the-art cache retrieval mainly focuses on the noncooperative caching mechanism, which is not efficient for constrained IoT networks. As an improvement, this article proposes a cooperative caching scheme for information-centric-IoT networks to optimize the cache hit with the support of a caching network topology model, a content popularity model, and an exogenous request access model. Simulations results reveal that the proposed cooperative caching scheme improves the cache hit rate, resource utilization, and reduce the network delay in IoT networks.

Certificateless Proxy Reencryption Scheme (CPRES) Based on Hyperelliptic Curve for Access Control in Content-Centric Network (CCN)

Information-centric networking is the developing model envisioned by an increasing body of the data communication research community, which shifts the current network paradigm from host centric to data centric, well-known to information-centric networking (ICN). Further, the ICN adopts different types of architectures to extend the growth of the Internet infrastructure, e.g., name-based routing and in-network caching. As a result, the data can be easily routed and accessed within the network. However, when the producer generates contents for authentic consumers, then it is necessary for him/her to have a technique for content confidentiality, privacy, and access control. To provide the previously mentioned services, this paper presents a certificateless proxy reencryption scheme (CPRES) based on the hyperelliptic curve for access control in the content-centric network (CCN). Using certificateless PRE, the power of the key generation center (KGC) is limited to only the generation of partial keys to secure the access to the content. With the help of these partial keys, the producer further calculates keys for encryption and reencryption process. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides secure access to content during end-to-end communication. Moreover, the proposed CPRES scheme outperforms in terms of low computational energy and efficient utilization of communication bandwidth.

An Effective Fairness Scheme for Named Data Networking

Named data networking (NDN) is a revolutionary approach to cater for modern and future Internet usage trends. The advancements in web services, social networks and cloud computing have shifted Internet utilization towards information delivery. Information-centric networking (ICN) enables content-awareness in the network layer and adopts name-based routing through the NDN architecture. Data delivery in NDN is receiver-driven pull-based and governed by requests (interests) sent out by the receiver. The ever-increasing share of high-volume media streams traversing the Internet due to the popularity and availability of video-streaming services can put a strain on network resources and lead to congestion. Since most congestion control techniques proposed for NDN are receiver-based and rely on the users to adjust their interest rates, a fairness scheme needs to be implemented at the intermediate network nodes to ensure that “rogue” users do not monopolize the available network resources. This paper proposes a fairness-based active queue management at network routers which performs per-flow interest rate shaping in order to ensure fair allocation of resources. Different congestion scenarios for both single path and multipath network topologies have been simulated to test the effectiveness of the proposed fairness scheme. Performance of the scheme is evaluated using Jain’s fairness index as a fairness metric.

A Lightweight Identity-Based Signature Scheme for Mitigation of Content Poisoning Attack in Named Data Networking With Internet of Things

Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the future envisioned networking paradigm used to provide fast and efficient content dissemination with interest-based content retrieval, name-based routing and in-network content caching. On the one hand, this new breed of future Internet architecture is becoming a key technology for data dissemination in the IoT networks; on the other hand, NDN suffers from new challenges in terms of data security. Among them, a content poisoning attack is the most common data security challenge. The aim of this attack is to inject poisoned content with an invalid signature to the network. Therefore, to prevent NDN against possible content poisoning attack, a signature of the contents is appended to each data packet for verifications. In this paper, we propose an identity-based signature scheme for IoT-based NDN networks, with a special emphasis on content integrity and authenticity. The proposed scheme is based on the concept of the Hyperelliptic curves, which provide the same level of security as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA), Bilinear pairing and Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC) with lower-key size. The proposed scheme is subject to both formal and informal security analysis in order to show the feasibility of our scheme. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed via comparison with the relevant existing schemes that authenticates the superiority of our scheme in terms of security and efficiency.

Fog-Computing-Enabled Cognitive Network Function Virtualization for an Information-Centric Future Internet

Information-centric networking (ICN) is an important trend that will impact the future of the Internet. ICN caters to large content consumption patterns while achieving high performance. New features in the information-centric future Internet, such as caching, name-based routing, and content-based security, bring novel challenges to a decentralized environment. On one hand, the processing capabilities on the edge in an information-centric future Internet need to implement smart analysis for large quantities of content. On the other hand, the computational and storage resources need to be configured and controlled on demand and based on cognition of the content from users. To address these challenges, this article proposes a fog-computing- enabled cognitive network functions virtualization approach for an information-centric future Internet. We first propose an on-demand caching function virtualization scheme and design a communication scheme between the fog nodes and the future Internet nodes for the forwarding process. Then, to attain smart control for related operations (i.e., routing, cache policy, and security), we propose a control function virtualization approach. Finally, a cognitive resource configuration mechanism is proposed. The simulation results show the advantages and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Advancing NovaGenesis Architecture Towards Future Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has been deeply challenging current Internet and emerging architectures, including 5G and future Internet. Many architectural limitations, such as weak security, data distribution efficiency, provenance and traceability of sources, excessive human intervention, lack of interoperability, and service-awareness in devices configuration, have been exposed and called the society attention. This paper addresses these limitations by properly integrating five strategies: 1) efficient IoT data exchanging, storage and processing via information-centric networking (ICN); 2) contract-based IoT services composition; 3) software-control/management of IoT devices accordingly to the services requirements; 4) naming and name resolution of the physical and virtual entities, proving identifier/locator splitting and contextualized self-organization; and 5) name-based routing and network caching. Considering the current state-of-the art, the main contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows: proposal of a novel service-defined architecture (SDA), in which device configurations are a reflex of the real service needs (given by established contracts); combination of ICN benefits with named-services; and perennial identification of IoT devices, services, and data using self-verifiable naming. All integration work has been supported by a convergent architecture called NovaGenesis (NG), demonstrating its viability as an alternative for the current IoT architectures. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented in laboratory under real conditions. The experimental results indicate competitive performance in terms of data transfer, memory and CPU consumption. Embedded NG has smaller RAM and ROM requirements when compared to a similar RPL + 6LowPAN stack. Data exchanging has been performed in few milliseconds in a local area network.

A Novel Fog Computing Based Architecture to Improve the Performance in Content Delivery Networks

Along with the continuing evolution of the Internet and its applications, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have become a hot topic with both opportunities and challenges. CDNs were mainly proposed to solve content availability and download time issues by delivering content through edge cache servers deployed around the world. In our previous work, we presented a novel CDN architecture based on a Fog computing environment as a promising solution for real-time applications. In such architecture, we proposed to use a name-based routing protocol following the Information Centric Networking (ICN) approach, with a popularity-based caching strategy to guarantee overall delivery performance. To validate our design principle, we have implemented the proposed Fog-based CDN architecture with its major protocol components and evaluated its performance, as shown through this article. On the one hand, we have extended the Optimized Link-State Routing (OLSR) protocol to be content aware (CA-OLSR), i.e., so that it uses content names as routing labels. Then, we have integrated CA-OLSR with the popularity-based caching strategy, which caches only the most popular content (MPC). On the other hand, we have considered two similar architectures for conducting performance comparative studies. The first is pure Fog-based CDN implemented by the original OLSR (IP-based routing) protocol along with the default caching strategy. The second is a classical cloud-based CDN implemented by the original OLSR. Through extensive simulation experiments, we have shown that our Fog-based CDN architecture outperforms the other compared architectures. CA-OLSR achieves the highest packet delivery ratio (PDR) and the lowest delay for all simulated numbers of connected users. Furthermore, the MPC caching strategy shows higher cache hit rates with fewer numbers of caching operations compared to the existing default caching strategy, which caches all the pass-by content.

Session persistence for dynamic web applications in Named Data Networking

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising future network architecture. It greatly facilitates static Web content distribution due to its information-centric communication paradigm, novel in-network caching, and name-based routing features. However, NDN still lacks efficient support for dynamic Web applications. Specifically, the inefficient communications are attributed to inherent features of NDN, such as its being multisource and multicast, as well as its decoupling of content from location. A dynamic Web request generally includes dozens of Interest packets. Since NDN lacks efficient support for the session persistence of dynamic Web applications, existing name-based forwarding strategies cannot effectively forward those Interest packets that belong to the same session to the specific server in cases where multiple server clusters are deployed by the Application Service Provider (ASP). This, therefore, leads to the packet retransmission problem: retransmitted Interest packets waste network resources and degrade the performance of dynamic Web applications. How to effectively maintain session persistence is worth considering for an NDN network. To this end, we design and implement a system framework that aims to enhance dynamic Web applications over NDN through a session-oriented approach. First, we propose a session-based forwarding model that maintains a virtual connection during an online interaction. Second, we design a robust forwarding scheme that can balance the dynamic content traffic with a fault recovery capability. Finally, we implement our approach and conduct experiments on the ndnSIM, network topology in the simulation is designed based on the China Education and Research Network 2. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves network utilization and reduces the service delay, i.e., 90.36%, 50.23% utilization improvement and 84.83%, 45.68% service delay reduction, respectively, compared with two existing approaches.

Improving NDN forwarding engine performance by rendezvous-based caching and forwarding

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new network architecture that shifts the communication paradigm from end-to-end communication to large-scale content retrieval. Unlike TCP/TP, NDN replaces the networking waist from IP addresses to content chunks. Data transmission in NDN is realized via name-based routing and forwarding. To carry out packet forwarding, each NDN forwarding engine maintains three data structures: a Pending Interest Table (PIT), a Forwarding Information Base (FIB), and a Content Store (CS). Since the name space of NDN is much larger than the IP address space and names in NDN can have a number of name components and be of variable length, it poses great challenges to store these tables in commercial NDN routers and meet the line-speed forwarding requirement.In this paper, we proposed a caching and forwarding scheme based on rendezvous points. In this scheme, requests for same or similar contents are forwarded to the same router, to mitigate the explosion problem of the three data structures. To realize our detoured forwarding without disturbing NDN’s forwarding logic, we proposed a mechanism to add detoured routing capability to NDN. Furthermore, by using our RP-based caching and forwarding, each router serves only a subset of the whole name space, so we added route cache to the FIB design to speed up packet forwarding, and proposed two approaches to tackle the cache hiding problem rooted from the longest prefix matching (LPM) on names of arbitrary length: the atomic route caching that groups multiple overlapping prefixes as a unit for cache operation, and the on-the-fly route caching that caches only the most specific prefixes. Trace driven simulations using HTTP request traces from China Mobile and Nanjing Normal University(NJNU) demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of our design.