LIRA: A Location Independent Routing Layer based on Source-Provided Ephemeral Names

We identify the obstacles hindering the deployment of Information Centric Networking (ICN) and the shift from the current IP architecture. In particular, we argue that scalability of name resolution and the lack of control of content access from content providers are two important barriers that keep ICN away from deployment. We design solutions to incentivise ICN deployment and present a new network architecture that incorporates an extra layer in the protocol stack (the Location Independent Routing Layer, LIRA) to integrate location-independent content delivery. According to our design, content names need not (and should not) be permanent, but rather should be ephemeral. Resolution of non-permanent names requires the involvement of content providers, enabling desirable features such as request logging and cache purging, while avoiding the need for the deployment of a new name resolution infrastructure. Our results show that with half of the network's nodes operating under the LIRA framework, we can get the full gain of the ICN mode of operation

Time Aware Least Recent Used (TLRU) Cache Management Policy in ICN

The information centric networks (ICN) can be viewed as a network of caches. Conversely, ICN type of cache networks has distinctive features e.g, contents popularity, usability time of content and other factors inflicts some diverse requirements for cache eviction policies. In this paper we defined four important characteristics of a suitable eviction policy for ICN. We analysed well known eviction policies in view of defined characteristics. Based upon analysis we propose a new eviction scheme which is well suitable for ICN type of cache networks.Comment: 5 pages, 8 figures, paper presented in conference IEEE ICACT'14, South Kore

Security, Privacy, and Access Control in Information-Centric Networking: A Survey

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a new networking paradigm, which replaces the widely used host-centric networking paradigm in communication networks (e.g., Internet, mobile ad hoc networks) with an information-centric paradigm, which prioritizes the delivery of named content, oblivious of the contents origin. Content and client security are more intrinsic in the ICN paradigm versus the current host centric paradigm where they have been instrumented as an after thought. By design, the ICN paradigm inherently supports several security and privacy features, such as provenance and identity privacy, which are still not effectively available in the host-centric paradigm. However, given its nascency, the ICN paradigm has several open security and privacy concerns, some that existed in the old paradigm, and some new and unique. In this article, we survey the existing literature in security and privacy research sub-space in ICN. More specifically, we explore three broad areas: security threats, privacy risks, and access control enforcement mechanisms. We present the underlying principle of the existing works, discuss the drawbacks of the proposed approaches, and explore potential future research directions. In the broad area of security, we review attack scenarios, such as denial of service, cache pollution, and content poisoning. In the broad area of privacy, we discuss user privacy and anonymity, name and signature privacy, and content privacy. ICN's feature of ubiquitous caching introduces a major challenge for access control enforcement that requires special attention. In this broad area, we review existing access control mechanisms including encryption-based, attribute-based, session-based, and proxy re-encryption-based access control schemes. We conclude the survey with lessons learned and scope for future work.Comment: 36 pages, 17 figure

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.Comment: Accepted by Sci China Inf Sci, Science China Information Sciences, 201

Resolution-Based Content Discovery in Network of Caches: Is the Control Traffic an Issue?

As networking attempts to cleanly separate the control plane and forwarding plane abstractions, it also defines a clear interface between these two layers. An underlying network state is represented as a view to act upon in the control plane. We are interested in studying some fundamental properties of this interface, both in a general framework, and in the specific case of content routing. We try to evaluate the traffic between the two planes based on allowing a minimum level of acceptable distortion in the network state representation in the control plane. We apply our framework to content distribution, and see how we can compute the overhead of maintaining the location of content in the control plane. This is of importance to evaluate resolution-based content discovery in content-oriented network architectures: we identify scenarios where the cost of updating the control plane for content routing overwhelms the benefit of fetching the nearest copy. We also show how to minimize the cost of this overhead when associating costs to peering traffic and to internal traffic for network of caches.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, Accepted in IEEE Transaction on Communications, 2017. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1406.128

Cooperative Hierarchical Caching in 5G Cloud Radio Access Networks (C-RANs)

Over the last few years, Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) has arisen as a transformative architecture for 5G cellular networks that brings the flexibility and agility of cloud computing to wireless communications. At the same time, content caching in wireless networks has become an essential solution to lower the content-access latency and backhaul traffic loading, which translate into user Quality of Experience (QoE) improvement and network cost reduction. In this article, a novel Cooperative Hierarchical Caching (CHC) framework in C-RAN is introduced where contents are jointly cached at the BaseBand Unit (BBU) and at the Radio Remote Heads (RRHs). Unlike in traditional approaches, the cache at the BBU, cloud cache, presents a new layer in the cache hierarchy, bridging the latency/capacity gap between the traditional edge-based and core-based caching schemes. Trace-driven simulations reveal that CHC yields up to 80% improvement in cache hit ratio, 21% decrease in average content-access latency, and 20% reduction in backhaul traffic load compared to the edge-only caching scheme with the same total cache capacity. Before closing the article, several challenges and promising opportunities for deploying content caching in C-RAN are highlighted towards a content-centric mobile wireless network.Comment: to appear on IEEE Network, July 201

Optimal Caching and Routing in Hybrid Networks

Hybrid networks consisting of MANET nodes and cellular infrastructure have been recently proposed to improve the performance of military networks. Prior work has demonstrated the benefits of in-network content caching in a wired, Internet context. We investigate the problem of developing optimal routing and caching policies in a hybrid network supporting in-network caching with the goal of minimizing overall content-access delay. Here, needed content may always be accessed at a back-end server via the cellular infrastructure; alternatively, content may also be accessed via cache-equipped "cluster" nodes within the MANET. To access content, MANET nodes must thus decide whether to route to in-MANET cluster nodes or to back-end servers via the cellular infrastructure; the in-MANET cluster nodes must additionally decide which content to cache. We model the cellular path as either i) a congestion-insensitive fixed-delay path or ii) a congestion-sensitive path modeled as an M/M/1 queue. We demonstrate that under the assumption of stationary, independent requests, it is optimal to adopt static caching (i.e., to keep a cache's content fixed over time) based on content popularity. We also show that it is optimal to route to in-MANET caches for content cached there, but to route requests for remaining content via the cellular infrastructure for the congestion-insensitive case and to split traffic between the in-MANET caches and cellular infrastructure for the congestion-sensitive case. We develop a simple distributed algorithm for the joint routing/caching problem and demonstrate its efficacy via simulation.Comment: submitted to Milcom 201

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

Asymptotically-Optimal Incentive-Based En-Route Caching Scheme

Content caching at intermediate nodes is a very effective way to optimize the operations of Computer networks, so that future requests can be served without going back to the origin of the content. Several caching techniques have been proposed since the emergence of the concept, including techniques that require major changes to the Internet architecture such as Content Centric Networking. Few of these techniques consider providing caching incentives for the nodes or quality of service guarantees for content owners. In this work, we present a low complexity, distributed, and online algorithm for making caching decisions based on content popularity, while taking into account the aforementioned issues. Our algorithm performs en-route caching. Therefore, it can be integrated with the current TCP/IP model. In order to measure the performance of any online caching algorithm, we define the competitive ratio as the ratio of the performance of the online algorithm in terms of traffic savings to the performance of the optimal offline algorithm that has a complete knowledge of the future. We show that under our settings, no online algorithm can achieve a better competitive ratio than $\Omega(\log n)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the network. Furthermore, we show that under realistic scenarios, our algorithm has an asymptotically optimal competitive ratio in terms of the number of nodes in the network. We also study an extension to the basic algorithm and show its effectiveness through extensive simulations

Scaling Laws of the Throughput Capacity and Latency in Information-Centric Networks

Wireless information-centric networks consider storage as one of the network primitives, and propose to cache data within the network in order to improve latency and reduce bandwidth consumption. We study the throughput capacity and delay in an information-centric network when the data cached in each node has a limited lifetime. The results show that with some fixed request and cache expiration rates, the order of the data access time does not change with network growth, and the maximum throughput order is inversely proportional to the square root and logarithm of the network size $n$ in cases of grid and random networks, respectively. Comparing these values with the corresponding throughput and latency with no cache capability (throughput inversely proportional to the network size, and latency of order $\sqrt{n}$ and $\sqrt{\frac{n}{\log n}}$ in grid and random networks, respectively), we can actually quantify the asymptotic advantage of caching. Moreover, we compare these scaling laws for different content discovery mechanisms and illustrate that not much gain is lost when a simple path search is used.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, This is the journal version of the paper presented in ITC25 under the name "On the throughput capacity of information-centric networks