Considerations on the Adoption of Named Data Networking (NDN) in Tactical Environments

Mobile military networks are uniquely challenging to build and maintain, because of their wireless nature and the unfriendliness of the environment, resulting in unreliable and capacity limited performance. Currently, most tactical networks implement TCP/IP, which was designed for fairly stable, infrastructure-based environments, and requires sophisticated and often application-specific extensions to address the challenges of the communication scenario. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a clean slate networking approach that does not depend on stable connections to retrieve information and naturally provides support for node mobility and delay/disruption tolerant communications - as a result it is particularly interesting for tactical applications. However, despite ICN seems to offer some structural benefits for tactical environments over TCP/IP, a number of challenges including naming, security, performance tuning, etc., still need to be addressed for practical adoption. This document, prepared within NATO IST-161 RTG, evaluates the effectiveness of Named Data Networking (NDN), the de facto standard implementation of ICN, in the context of tactical edge networks and its potential for adoption

The Road Ahead for Networking: A Survey on ICN-IP Coexistence Solutions

In recent years, the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm shift in the usage model, which has pushed researchers towards the design of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task. Some research groups have already addressed the coexistence by designing their own architectures, but none of those is the final solution to move towards the future Internet considering the unaltered state of the networking. To design such architecture, the research community needs now a comprehensive overview of the existing solutions that have so far addressed the coexistence. The purpose of this paper is to reach this goal by providing the first comprehensive survey and classification of the coexistence architectures according to their features (i.e., deployment approach, deployment scenarios, addressed coexistence requirements and architecture or technology used) and evaluation parameters (i.e., challenges emerging during the deployment and the runtime behaviour of an architecture). We believe that this paper will finally fill the gap required for moving towards the design of the final coexistence architecture.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 3 table

A hybrid rate control mechanism for forwarding and congestion control in named data network

Named Data Networking (NDN) is an emerging Internet architecture that employs a pull-based, in-path caching, hop-by-hop, and multi-path transport architecture. Therefore, transport algorithms which use conventional paradigms would not work correctly in the NDN environment, since the content source location frequently changes. These changes raise forwarding and congestion control problems, and they directly affect the link utilization, fairness, and stability of the network. This study proposes a Hybrid Rate Control Mechanism (HRCM) to control the forwarding rate and link congestion to enhance network scalability, stability, and fairness performance. HRCM consists of three schemes namely Shaping Deficit Weight Round Robin (SDWRR), Queue-delay Parallel Multipath (QPM), and Explicit Control Agile-based conservative window adaptation (EC-Agile). The SDWRR scheme is scheduling different flows in router interfaces by fairly detecting and notifying the link congestion. The QPM scheme has been designed to forward Interest packets to all available paths that utilize idle bandwidths. The EC-Agile scheme controls forwarding rates by examining each packet received. The proposed HRCM was evaluated by comparing it with two different mechanisms, namely Practical Congestion Control (PCON) and Hop-by-hop Interest Shaping (HIS) through ndnSIM simulation. The findings show that HRCM enhances the forwarding rate and fairness. HRCM outperforms HIS and PCON in terms of throughput by 75%, delay 20%, queue length 55%, link utilization 41%, fairness 20%, and download time 20%. The proposed HRCM contributes to providing an enhanced forwarding rate and fairness in NDN with different types of traffic flow. Thus, the SDWRR, QPM, and EC-Agile schemes can be used in monitoring, controlling, and managing congestion and forwarding for the Internet of the future