Name-based Routing Research Articles

AFIRM: Adaptive forwarding based link recovery for mobility support in NDN/IoT networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem includes a plethora of devices equipped with heterogeneous communication interfaces. They exhibit different mobility patterns and hardware constraints as memory, battery and processing power. On the other hand, IoT applications are overlayed on top of these constrained-devices imposing stringent requirements in term of data availability, data coherence, and response latency. To cope with these challenges, Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture is positioned in the middle layer to act as the networking layer. By providing easy data access thanks to the unique and location-independent content names, in-network caching and name-based routing, NDN expects to hide from IoT applications the complexity and diversity of the underlying Things by adapting the network operation to their features. In this paper, we focus on data availability requirements threatened by high IoT network dynamics related to sensors mobility. We address the producer mobility issue in NDN/IoT networks using the routing-based approach. We propose a novel and efficient forwarding algorithm named AFIRM in order to support producer mobility, and compare its performances to those of other relevant solutions based on the routing approach.

ACCP: adaptive congestion control protocol in named data networking based on deep learning

Named data networking (NDN) is a novel network architecture which adopts a receiver-driven transport approach. However, NDN is the name-based routing and source uncontrollability, and network congestion is inevitable. In this paper, we propose an adaptive congestion control protocol (ACCP) which is divided into two phase to control network congestion before affecting network performance. In the first phase, we employ the time series prediction model based on deep learning to predict the source of congestion for each node. In the second phase, we estimate the level of network congestion by the average queue length based on the outcomes of first phase in each router and explicitly return it back to receiver, and then the receiver adjusts sending rate of Interest packets to realize congestion control. Simulation experiment results show that our proposed ACCP scheme has better performance than ICP and CHoPCoP in terms of the high utilization and minimal packet drop in a multi-source/multi-path environment.

Investigating Route Cache in Named Data Networking

Named data networking is a new communication paradigm for the future networking architecture, which shifts the networking from a host-oriented architecture to an information-centric one. Its data transmission is realized via name-based routing and forwarding. This, however, brings severe challenges to the scalability of the forwarding information base (FIB) because the name space is infinite and can be several orders of magnitude larger than the IP counterpart. This letter tries to mitigate the FIB explosion problem and achieve high-speed forwarding by adding route cache to the FIB design. We proposed two approaches to tackle the cache hiding problem rooted from the longest prefix matching on names of arbitrary length: the atomic caching that groups multiple overlapping prefixes as a unit for cache operation, and the on-the-fly caching that caches only the most specific prefixes. Trace-driven simulation using an HTTP request trace from China Mobile demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of our design.

Cache Freshness in Named Data Networking for the Internet of Things

The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is shaping the foreseen future Internet architecture by focusing on the data itself rather than its hosting location. It is a shift from a host-centric communication model to a content-centric model supporting among others unique and location-independent content names, in-network caching and name-based routing. By leveraging the easy data access, and reducing both the retrieval delay and the load on the data producer, the ICN can be a viable framework to support the Internet of Things (IoT), interconnecting billions of heterogeneous constrained objects. Among several ICN architectures, the Named Data Networking (NDN) is considered as a suitable ICN architecture for IoT systems. However, its default caching approach lacks a data freshness mechanism, while IoT data are transient and frequently updated by the producer which imposes stringent requirements in terms of information freshness. Furthermore, IoT devices are usually resource-constrained with harsh limitations on energy, memory and processing power. We propose in this paper a caching strategy and a novel cache freshness mechanism to monitor the validity of cached contents in an IoT environment while minimizing the caching process cost. We compared our solution to several relevant schemes using the ccnSim simulator. Our solution exhibits the best system performances in terms of hop reduction ratio, server hit reduction ratio and response latency, yet it provides the lowest cache cost and significantly improves the content validity.

Video streaming distribution over mobile Internet: a survey

In recent times, mobile Internet has witnessed the explosive growth of video applications, embracing user-generated content, Internet Protocol television (IPTV), live streaming, video-on-demand, video conferencing, and FaceTime-like video communications. The exponential rise of video traffic and dynamic user behaviors have proved to be a major challenge to video resource sharing and delivery in the mobile environment. In this article, we present a survey of state-of-the-art video distribution solutions over the Internet. We first discuss the challenges of mobile peer-to-peer (MP2P)-based solutions and categorize them into two groups. We discuss the design idea, characteristics, and drawbacks of solutions in each group. We also give a review for solutions of video transmission in wireless heterogeneous networks. Furthermore, we summarize the information-centric networking (ICN)-based video solutions in terms of in-network caching and name-based routing. Finally, we outline the open issues for mobile video systems that require further studies.

Software Defined Networking Meets Information Centric Networking: A Survey

Information centric networking (ICN) and software-defined networking (SDN) are two emerging networking paradigms that promise to solve different aspects of networking problems. ICN is a clean-slate design for accommodating the ever increasing growth of the Internet traffic by regarding content as the network primitive, adopting in-network caching, and name-based routing, while SDN focuses on agile and flexible network management by decoupling network control logic from data forwarding. ICN and SDN have gained significant research attention separately in the most of the previous work. However, the features of ICN have profound impacts on the design and operation of SDN, such as in-network caching and data-centric security. Conversely, SDN provides a powerful tool for experimenting and deploying ICN architectures and can greatly facilitate ICN functionality and management. In this paper, we point out the necessity of surveying the scattered works on integrating SDN and ICN (SD-ICN) for improving operational networks. Specifically, we analyze the points of SD-ICN strengths and opportunities, and discuss the SDN enablers for deploying ICN architectures. In addition, we review and classify the recent work on improving the network management by SD-ICN and discuss the potential security benefits of SD-ICN. Finally, a number of open issues and future trends are highlighted.

Storage management in DONA content routers

Information-centric networking (ICN) as an emerging paradigm for the future introduces a radical change in internet communications. It allows information access regardless of their location and it defines innovative concepts such as forwarding, name-based routing, security and caching. Many ICN architectures have been proposed over the past few years such as DONA, NetInf, CCN, NDN, publish-subscribe architecture, etc. In this paper, we focus especially on DONA, one of the first ICN architecture, and we analyse the required memory space to store routing states. Our study shows that today's technologies are not able to satisfy the content routing needs. Thus, we propose an enhancement of DONA called BADONA to deal with this problem. It uses the Bloom filter to drastically reduce the usage of the memory space. We evaluate our proposal performances and compare it with two ICN solutions: CCN and DHTChord to find out how these models scale when they are deployed over large networks. The obtained simulation results show that our solution reduces considerably the memory usage, and the decreasing ratio reaches the value of 40 with the standard Bloom filter version. Moreover, BADONA outperforms the other existing schemes.

Mitigating Content Poisoning With Name-Key Based Forwarding and Multipath Forwarding Based Inband Probe for Energy Management in Smart Cities

As a promising future Internet architecture, named data networking (NDN) supports name-based routing and caching for content retrieval throughout the network, which enables fast, reliable, and, more importantly, energy-efficient content dissemination in smart cities. However, NDN’s vulnerability against the content poisoning attack is considered to decelerate the process of applying NDN to energy management in smart cities. The content poisoning isolates valid content from the network by injecting a poisoned content with a legitimate name into in-network caches. The caching, delivery, and signature verification of poisoned content diminish the advantage of NDN in energy efficiency when it disseminates content in smart cities. This paper focuses on content poisoning mitigation for energy management in smart cities and first analyzes the state of the art and the challenges of content poisoning mitigation. We then propose a light-weight mitigation mechanism by enhancing NDN with a name-key-based forwarding and multipath forwarding-based inband probe. Name-key-based forwarding forwards interests toward content sources trusted by consumers to reduce the injection of poisoned content. If there is still on-path content poisoning, the multipath forwarding of a reissued interest that excludes poisoned content acts as inband probes and invokes on-demand signature verifications at intermediate routers. This purges poisoned content from caches as soon as possible, delivers legitimate content to the present consumer, and restores legitimate content retrieval for future Interests without requiring any out-of-band communications. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed content poisoning mitigation mechanism restores legitimate content retrieval pretty soon with relatively small verification overhead at intermediate routers and is well adapted to diverse network settings, which would accelerate the deployment of NDN in smart cities to disseminate content in an energy-efficient way.

Non-uniform EWMA-PCA based cache size allocation scheme in Named Data Networks

As a data-centric cache-enabled architecture, Named Data Networking (NDN) is considered to be an appropriate alternative to the current host-centric IP-based Internet infrastructure. Leveraging in-network caching, name-based routing, and receiver-driven sessions, NDN can greatly enhance the way Internet resources are being used. A critical issue in NDN is the procedure of cache allocation and management. Our main contribution in this research is the analysis of memory requirements to allocate suitable Content-Store size to NDN routers, with respect to combined impacts of long-term centrality-based metric and Exponential Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) of short-term parameters such as users behaviors and outgoing traffic. To determine correlations in such large data sets, data mining methods can prove valuable to researchers. In this paper, we apply a data-fusion approach, namely Principal Component Analysis (PCA), to discover relations from short- and long-term parameters of the router. The output of PCA, exploited to mine out raw data sets, is used to allocate a proper cache size to the router. Evaluation results show an increase in the hit ratio of Content-Stores in sources, and NDN routers. Moreover, for the proposed cache size allocation scheme, the number of unsatisfied and pending Interests in NDN routers is smaller than the Degree-Centrality cache size scheme.

BFAST: High-Speed and Memory-Efficient Approach for NDN Forwarding Engine

Named data networking (NDN) is a future Internet architecture that directly emphasizes accessible content by assigning each piece of content a unique name. Data transmission in NDN is realized via name-based routing and forwarding. Name-based forwarding information base (FIB) usually has much more and longer prefixes than IP-based ones, and therefore, name-based forwarding brings more challenges on the NDN router in terms of high forwarding throughput, low memory consumption, and fast FIB update. In this paper, we present an index data structure called BFAST for the name-based FIB. BFAST is designed based on a basic hash table, it employs a counting Bloom filter to balance the load among hash table slots, so that the number of items in each non-empty slot is close to 1, leading to low searching time in each slot. Meanwhile, the first-rank-indexed scheme is proposed to effectively reduce the massive memory consumption required by the pointers in all the hash table slots. Evaluation results show that, for the longest prefix match FIB lookup, BFAST achieves a speed of 2.14 MS/S using one thread, and meanwhile, the memory consumption is reasonably low. By leveraging the parallelism of today’s multi-core CPU, BFAST arrives at an FIB lookup speed of 33.64 MS/S using 24 threads, and the latency is around $0.71~\mu s$ .

Distributed All-IP Mobility Management Architecture Supported by the NDN Overlay

Two of the most promising candidate solutions for realizing the next-generation all-IP mobile networks are Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), which is the host-based and global mobility supporting protocol, and Proxy MIPv6 (PMIPv6), which is the network-based and localized mobility supporting protocol. However, the unprecedented growth of mobile Internet traffic has resulted in the development of distributed mobility management (DMM) architecture by the Internet engineering task force DMM working group. The extension of the basic MIPv6 and PMIPv6 to support their distributed and scalable deployment in the future is one of the major goals of the DMM working group. We propose an all-IP-based mobility management architecture that leverages the concept of Named Data Networking (NDN), which is a distributed content management and addressing architecture. In the proposed solution, mobility support services are distributed among multiple anchor points at the edge of the network, thereby enabling a flat architecture that exploits name-based routing in NDN. Our approach overcomes some of the major limitations of centralized IP mobility management solutions, by extending existing routing protocol and mobility management architecture, to distribute the mobility management function of anchor points in the IP network and optimize the transmission path of mobile traffic.

$\alpha$Route: Routing on Names

One of the crucial building blocks for Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a name based routing scheme that can route directly on content names instead of IP addresses. However, moving the address space from IP addresses to content names brings the scalability issues to a whole new level, due to two reasons. First, name aggregation is not as trivial a task as the IP address aggregation in BGP routing. Second, the number of addressable contents in the Internet is several orders of magnitude higher than the number of IP addresses. With the current size of the Internet, name based, anycast routing is very challenging specially when routing efficiency is of prime importance. We propose a name-based routing scheme $\alpha$ Route for ICN that offers efficient bandwidth usage, guaranteed content lookup and scalable routing table size. $\alpha$ Route consists of two components: an alphanumeric Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and an overlay to underlay (Internet topology) mapping algorithm. Simulation results show that $\alpha$ Route performs significantly better than Content Centric Network (CCN) in terms of network bandwidth usage, lookup latency and load balancing.

Service Provisioning in Content-Centric Networking: Challenges, Opportunities, and Promising Directions

Contemporary IP-based Internet architecture increasingly is unable to meet the demands of current network usage patterns. Content-centric networking (CCN), as a clean-slate future network architecture, is different from existing IP networks and has some salient features, such as in-network caching, name-based routing, friendly mobility, and built-in security. This architecture has a profound impact on how Internet applications are provisioned. Here, from the perspective of upper-layer applications, the authors discuss challenges and opportunities regarding service provisioning in CCN. They also describe the Service Innovation Environment for Future Internet, their approach that addresses challenges while exploiting opportunities for the future of CCN.

CONSERT: Constructing optimal name-based routing tables

Name-based routing belongs to a routing category different from address-based routing, it is usually adopted by content-oriented networks [Sharma et al., 2014, Koponen et al., 2007, Rajahalme et al.,2011, Thaler et al.,1998, Hwang et al., 2010, Gritter et al., 2001, Caesar et al., 2006, Carzaniga et al., 2004, Koponen et al., 2007, Hwang et al., 2009 Singla et al., 2010, Detti et al., 2011, Jain et al., 2011 Xu et al., 2013, Katsaros et al., 2012. [1–15]] e.g., the recently proposed Named Data Networking (NDN). It populates routers with name-based routing tables, which are composed of name prefixesand their corresponding next hop(s). Name-based routing tables are believed to have much larger size than IP routing tables, because of the large amount of name prefixes and the unbounded length of each prefix. This paper presents CONSERT—an algorithm that, given an arbitrary name-based routing table as input, computes a routing table with the minimal number of prefixes, while keeping equivalent forwarding behavior. The optimal routing table also supports incremental update. We formulate the CONSERT algorithm and prove its optimality with an induction method. Evaluation results show that, CONSERT can reduce 18% to 45% prefixes in the synthetic routing tables depending on the distribution of the next hops, and meanwhile improve the lookup performance by more than 20%. Prior efforts usually focus on compact data structures and lookup algorithms so as to reduce memory consumption and expedite lookup speed of the routing table, while CONSERT compresses the routing table from another perspective: it removes the inherent “redundancy” in the routing table. Therefore, CONSERT is orthogonal to these prior efforts, thus the combination of CONSERT and a prior compressing method would further optimize the memory consumption and lookup speed of the routing table. E.g., we can first adopt CONSERT to achieve the optimal routing table, and afterwards apply NameFilter [Wang et al., 2013. [16], a two-stage-Bloom-filter method, to that optimal table. This combination diminishes the memory consumption of the routing table data structure by roughly 88%, and increases the lookup throughput by around 17% simultaneously. The joint method outperforms each individual method in terms of memory savings and absolute lookup throughout increase.

An Aggregatable Name-Based Routing for Energy-Efficient Data Sharing in Big Data Era

Big data strongly demands a network infrastructure having the capability to efficiently collect, process, cache, share, and deliver the data, instead of simple transmissions. Such network designs show the requirements of energy efficiency, availability, high performance, and data-aware intelligence. To meet these requirements, we adopt the information-centric networking (ICN) approach, where data are retrieved through names and in-network caching is utilized. However, as the typical existing ICN architectures, content centric network (CCN) cannot efficiently utilize the caches for data sharing because of the on-path caching strategy, and network of information (NetInf) demonstrates the resolution latency for data retrievals. To design an efficient and effective ICN architecture for big data sharing, we combine the strong points of CCN and NetInf, where information islands (IOIs) and management plane are utilized for direct data retrieval and global data discovery, respectively. We provide a reference architecture and propose an aggregatable name-based routing (ANBR), which can naturally enable consumers to retrieve the closest copy of information. In this network, each piece of data can be cached at one IOI at most once, which greatly improves the efficiency of cache usages. The consumers first try to retrieve the data in the local IOI, and then try to globally retrieve it from the closest IOI, holding the copy of the data if necessary. We investigate the impact from the key factor, IOI size, to the energy consumption of ANBR. It shows that energy consumption first decreases and then increases as the IOI size increases, and the optimized IOI size can be found for deployment. Furthermore, we study the relation between the optimized IOI size and the average retrieval times for the data. The result shows that the optimized IOI size increases as the average retrieval times increase.

Content discovery for information-centric networking

The information-centric networking (ICN) adopts a content name as a network identifier and utilizes in-network storages to cache the contents. With the name-based routing and content caching, ICN can provide substantial benefits such as faster content retrieval and network traffic reduction by exploiting a nearby (cached) copy of content and reducing duplicated transmissions for the same content request. Prior researches on ICN usually rely on an opportunistic cache-hit (happen-to-meet) to utilize the in-network storages. In the happen-to-meet fashion, only the content cached on the path towards the content source can be utilized, which limits the network-wide usage of the in-network storages. To exploit cached contents better, we propose a content discovery scheme, dubbed SCAN, which can exploit nearby content copies for the efficient delivery. SCAN exchanges the cached content information among the neighbor routers using Bloom filters for the content discovery. With extensive simulations, SCAN shows better performance than a happen-to-meet cache-hit scheme in terms of average hop counts, traffic volume, and load balancing among links.

Towards a quantitative comparison of location-independent network architectures

This paper presents a quantitative methodology and results comparing different approaches for {\it location-independent} communication. Our approach is empirical and is based on real Internet topologies, routing tables from real routers, and a measured workload of the mobility of devices and content across network addresses today. We measure the extent of network mobility exhibited by mobile devices with a home-brewn Android app deployed on hundreds of smartphones, and measure the network mobility of Internet content from distributed vantage points. We combine this measured data with our quantitative methodology to analyze the different cost-benefit tradeoffs struck by location-independent network architectures with respect to routing update cost, path stretch, and forwarding table size. We find that more than 20% of users change over 10 IP addresses a day, suggesting that mobility is the norm rather than the exception, so intrinsic and efficient network support for mobility is critical. We also find that with purely name-based routing approaches, each event involving the mobility of a device or popular content may result in an update at up to 14% of Internet routers; but, the fraction of impacted routers is much smaller for the long tail of unpopular content. These results suggest that recent proposals for pure name-based networking are suitable for highly aggregateable content that does not move frequently but may need to be augmented with addressing-assisted approaches to handle device mobility.

Forwarding strategies in named data wireless ad hoc networks: Design and evaluation

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising information-centric architecture for the future Internet that is also gaining momentum in wireless ad hoc networks as an alternative paradigm to traditional IP networking. NDN shares with other information-centric proposals the same innovative concepts, such as named content, name-based routing, and in-network content caching. These principles and the simple and robust communication model, based on Interest and Data packets exchange, make NDN especially appealing for deployment in wireless ad hoc environments, characterized by a broadcast error-prone channel and time-varying topologies.Nevertheless, making NDN-based solutions really effective in ad hoc networks requires rethinking some of the basic NDN forwarding principles to cope with wireless links and node mobility. In this paper, we analyze two classes of forwarding approaches: (i) a minimalist, provider-blind forwarding strategy, only aimed at keeping packet redundancy on the broadcast wireless medium under control, without any knowledge about the neighborhood and the identity of the content sources; and (ii) a provider-aware strategy, which leverages soft state information about the content sources, piggybacked in Interest and Data packets and locally kept by nodes, to facilitate content retrieval.Performance evaluation is carried by means of ndnSIM, the official NDN simulator, that is overhauled for use in realistic wireless ad hoc environments. Results collected under variable traffic loads and topologies provide insights into the behavior of both forwarding approaches and help to derive a set of recommendations that are crucial to the successful design of a forwarding strategy for named data ad hoc wireless networking.

Scenario analysis for commercial Internet content delivery

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze the key uncertainties and to construct alternative future scenarios for Internet content delivery. The relative positions and roles of different actors and content delivery technologies in each scenario are then discussed. As traffic volume rapidly grows, the current Internet architecture faces scalability issues. To meet the demand, technical solutions utilizing caching and name-based routing are developed. Design/methodology/approach – This work followed a scenario planning process, and two workshops were organized for identifying the key trends and uncertainties. Industry architecture notation was used to systematically illustrate and compare the constructed scenarios. Findings – Of the 94 forces identified, the revenue model and Internet service provider's (ISP’s) role in content provision were singled out as the two most important uncertainties, upon which four scenarios were constructed. In-network caching technologies are strong candidates in ISP-dominated scenarios. Content delivery networks are more likely outcomes in scenarios, where content providers’ role is significant. Research limitations/implications – The paper focuses on qualitative analysis of scenarios. Utilizing, for instance, system dynamics to model interdependencies between the trends and uncertainties could provide a path toward quantitative analysis. Originality/value – The paper increases understanding of relative positions and roles of different actors and technologies in possible future scenarios. The findings are important, especially for ISPs, content providers and technology vendors. The scenarios can be used to identify desirable futures and strategies to achieve them and to make informed choices in technology design to meet the demands of key actors.

A Novel Routing Scheme for ICN

Internet has become as a social infrastructure. The current Internet architecture based on TCP/IP is faced with many challenges. This fact makes the clean slate design of future Internet architecture represented by ICN (Information-Centric Networking) be a hot research topic. In this paper, a novel routing scheme for ICN (Information-Centric Networking) is proposed. On the basis of name-based routing, a process was designed to look for other available interface through which the backtracking-condition-met interest packet will be forwarded, which can reduce the network blocking rate. Moreover, FIB (Forwarding Information Base) of neighbor nodes will be modified when data packets go through a router, which can realize the efficient use of cache. Also, a concept of "popularity" is introduced to improve CS (Content Store) hit rate. The proposed routing scheme is implemented on NSFNET by simulation, and the experimental results have shown that it is feasible and effective.