Vicinity-based Replica Finding in Named Data Networking

In Named Data Networking (NDN) architectures, a content object is located according to the content's identifier and can be retrieved from all nodes that hold a replica of the content. The default forwarding strategy of NDN is to forward an Interest packet along the default path from the requester to the server to find a content object according to its name prefix. However, the best path may not be the default path, since content might also be located nearby. Hence, the default strategy could result in a sub-optimal delivery efficiency. To address this issue we introduce a vicinity-based replica finding scheme. This is based on the observation that content objects might be requested several times. Therefore, replicas can be often cached within a particular neighbourhood and thus it might be efficient to specifically look for them in order to improve the content delivery performance. Within this paper, we evaluate the optimal size of the vicinity within which content should be located (i.e. the distance between the requester and its neighbours that are considered within the content search). We also compare the proposed scheme with the default NDN forwarding strategy with respect to replica finding efficiency and network overhead. Using the proposed scheme, we demonstrate that the replica finding mechanism reduces the delivery time effectively with acceptable overhead costs

On the realization of VANET using named data networking: On improvement of VANET using NDN-based routing, caching, and security

Named data networking (NDN) presents a huge opportunity to tackle some of the unsolved issues of IP-based vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). The core characteristics of NDN such as the name-based routing, in-network caching, and built-in data security provide better management of VANET proprieties (e.g., the high mobility, link intermittency, and dynamic topology). This study aims at providing a clear view of the state-of-the-art on the developments in place, in order to leverage the characteristics of NDN in VANET. We resort to a systematic literature review (SLR) to perform a reproducible study, gathering the proposed solutions and summarizing the main open challenges on implementing NDN-based VANET. There exist several related studies, but they are more focused on other topics such as forwarding. This work specifically restricts the focus on VANET improvements by NDN-based routing (not forwarding), caching, and security. The surveyed solution herein presented is performed between 2010 and 2021. The results show that proposals on the selected topics for NDN-based VANET are recent (mainly from 2016 to 2021). Among them, caching is the most investigated topic. Finally, the main findings and the possible roadmaps for further development are highlighted

Decoupling Information and Connectivity via Information-Centric Transport

The power of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures lies in their abstraction for communication --- the request for named data. This abstraction promises that applications can choose to operate only in the information plane, agnostic to the mechanisms implemented in the connectivity plane. However, despite this powerful promise, the information and connectivity planes are presently coupled in today\u27s incarnations of leading ICNs by a core architectural component, the forwarding strategy. Presently, this component is not sustainable: it implements both the information and connectivity mechanisms without specifying who should choose a forwarding strategy --- an application developer or the network operator. In practice, application developers can specify a strategy only if they understand connectivity details, while network operators can assign strategies only if they understand application expectations. In this paper, we define the role of forwarding strategies, and we introduce Information-Centric Transport (ICT) as an abstraction for cleanly decoupling the information plane from the connectivity plane. We discuss how ICTs allow applications to operate in the information plane, concerned only with namespaces and trust identities, leaving network node operators free to deploy whatever strategy mechanisms make sense for the connectivity that they manage. To illustrate the ICT concept, we demonstrate ICT-Sync and ICT-Notify. We show how these ICTs 1) enable applications to operate regardless of connectivity details, 2) are designed to satisfy a predefined set of application requirements and are free from application-specifics, and 3) can be deployed by network operators where needed, without requiring any change to the application logic

Named Multipath Depth-First Search: An SDN-based Routing Strategy for Efficient Failure Handling and Content Delivery in NDN

Information-centric networking (ICN) architectures, such as named data networking (NDN), have emerged as potential solutions for efficiently retrieving and delivering content. However, challenges remain regarding routing scalability, resilience, and caching efficiency. Software-defined networking (SDN) offers opportunities to optimize NDN implementations through centralized control and programmability. In this paper, we propose Named Multipath DFS, an SDN-based routing and caching scheme for NDN networks. NMDFS leverages a centralized controller to pre-compute multipath routes and implement coordinated caching. We evaluate NMDFS on an emulated topology testbed against default NDN and Named-data link state routing. The results demonstrate significant improvements with NMDFS, reducing overhead signalling costs by 94% and 78%, respectively, compared with other schemes. Round-trip latencies for content retrieval were reduced by up to 98%. The SDN controller’s global network view and control are leveraged to optimize content caching through packet loss-driven adaptation and eliminate redundant messaging, leading to substantial performance gains

Named Data Networking in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks: State-of-the-Art and Challenges

International audienceInformation-Centric Networking (ICN) has been proposed as one of the future Internet architectures. It is poised to address the challenges faced by today's Internet that include, but not limited to, scalability, addressing, security, and privacy. Furthermore, it also aims at meeting the requirements for new emerging Internet applications. To realize ICN, Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the recent implementations of ICN that provides a suitable communication approach due to its clean slate design and simple communication model. There are a plethora of applications realized through ICN in different domains where data is the focal point of communication. One such domain is Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) realized through Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) where vehicles exchange information and content with each other and with the infrastructure. To date, excellent research results have been yielded in the VANET domain aiming at safe, reliable, and infotainment-rich driving experience. However, due to the dynamic topologies, host-centric model, and ephemeral nature of vehicular communication, various challenges are faced by VANET that hinder the realization of successful vehicular networks and adversely affect the data dissemination, content delivery, and user experiences. To fill these gaps, NDN has been extensively used as underlying communication paradigm for VANET. Inspired by the extensive research results in NDN-based VANET, in this paper, we provide a detailed and systematic review of NDN-driven VANET. More precisely, we investigate the role of NDN in VANET and discuss the feasibility of NDN architecture in VANET environment. Subsequently, we cover in detail, NDN-based naming, routing and forwarding, caching, mobility, and security mechanism for VANET. Furthermore, we discuss the existing standards, solutions, and simulation tools used in NDN-based VANET. Finally, we also identify open challenges and issues faced by NDN-driven VANET and highlight future research directions that should be addressed by the research community

TagNet: a scalable tag-based information-centric network

The Internet has changed dramatically since the time it was created. What was originally a system to connect relatively few remote users to mainframe computers, has now become a global network of billions of diverse devices, serving a large user population, more and more characterized by wireless communication, user mobility, and large-scale, content-rich, multi-user applications that are stretching the basic end-to-end, point-to-point design of TCP/IP. In recent years, researchers have introduced the concept of Information Centric Networking (ICN). The ambition of ICN is to redesign the Internet with a new service model more suitable to today's applications and users. The main idea of ICN is to address information rather than hosts. This means that a user could access information directly, at the network level, without having to first find out which host to contact to obtain that information. The ICN architectures proposed so far are based on a "pull" communication service. This is because today's Internet carries primarily video traffic that is easy to serve through pull communication primitives. Another common design choice in ICN is to name content, typically with hierarchical names similar to file names or URLs. This choice is once again rooted in the use of URLs to access Web content. However, names offer only a limited expressiveness and may or may not aggregate well at a global scale. In this thesis we present a new ICN architecture called TagNet. TagNet intends to offer a richer communication model and a new addressing scheme that is at the same time more expressive than hierarchical names from the viewpoint of applications, and more effective from the viewpoint of the network for the purpose of routing and forwarding. For the service model, TagNet extends the mainstream "pull" ICN with an efficient "push" network-level primitive. Such push service is important for many applications such as social media, news feeds, and Internet of Things. Push communication could be implemented on top of a pull primitive, but all such implementations would suffer for high traffic overhead and/or poor performance. As for the addressing scheme, TagNet defines and uses different types of addresses for different purposes. Thus TagNet allows applications to describe information by means of sets of tags. Such tag-based descriptors are true content-based addresses, in the sense that they characterize the multi-dimensional nature of information without forcing a partitioning of the information space as is done with hierarchical names. Furthermore, descriptors are completely user-defined, and therefore give more flexibility and expressive power to users and applications, and they also aggregate by subset. By their nature, descriptors have no relation to the network topology and are not intended to identify content univocally. Therefore, TagNet complements descriptors with locators and identifiers. Locators are network-defined addresses that can be used to forward packets between known nodes (as in the current IP network); content identifiers are unique identifiers for particular blocks of content, and therefore can be used for authentication and caching. In this thesis we propose a complete protocol stack for TagNet covering the routing scheme, forwarding algorithm, and congestion control at the transport level. We then evaluate the whole protocol stack showing that (1) the use of both push and pull services at the network level reduces network traffic significantly; (2) the tree-based routing scheme we propose scales well, with routing tables that can store billions of descriptors in a few gigabytes thanks to descriptor aggregation; (3) the forwarding engine with specialized matching algorithms for descriptors and locators achieves wire-speed forwarding rates; and (4) the congestion control is able to effectively and fairly allocate all the bandwidth available in the network while minimizing the download time of an object and avoiding congestion

On-Demand Routing for Scalable Name-Based Forwarding

Information-centric Networking (ICN) is a future Internet architecture design, where application-level names are directly used to route interests to fetch a copy of the desired content/data from any location. Following the conventions of the Internet Protocol to store the pre-computed routing/forwarding state for all prefixes at the network nodes raises scalability concerns in ICN (where content name prefixes need to be stored), especially at the inter-domain level. Instead, we consider the other extreme; that is, On-Demand Routing (ODR) computation for content name prefixes as interests arrive. ODR makes use of domain-level, per-prefix routing instructions usable by all the forwarders in a domain, named Routing Information Objects (RIO). Forwarders discover and retrieve RIOs in a similar way as content and can be cached in a new data structure called Route Information Store (RIS). RIOs are handed to a routing strategy module to perform a routing decision before relaying the packets. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that ODR scales the storage of routing/forwarding information through caching and information discovery-two mechanisms inherent to the ICN design. We propose our design as an extension of the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture and discuss all the proposed enhancements in detail

Execução remota e offloading de computação em NDN

The way the Internet is currently used is completely different from how it was intended to be used, which results in a number of shortcomings for the current demands. To address IP’s deficiencies, new clean-slate architectures started to emerge. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is one of them. It provides architectural advantages like resource naming, built-in caching and security, effective forwarding and others. One of the Internet usage segments that has expanded the most is edge computing. Applying new architectures to the edge computing has many benefits. The advantages of using Named Data Networking (NDN), an ICN implementation, in the context of edge computing were examined in this dissertation. The emphasis is on remote execution and offloading of functions to the network. A framework is proposed for enabling remote execution and its application in edge offloading in NDN. New methods for delivering input arguments to functions and obtaining the execution result were studied. The framework is validated and its performance is evaluated.A forma como a Internet é usada atualmente é completamente diferente de como ela se destinava a ser utilizada, o que resulta numa série de deficiências para as exigências atuais. Para resolver as deficiências do IP, novas arquiteturas clean-slate estão a surgir. A Information-Centric Networking (ICN) é uma delas. Oferece vantagens de arquitetura como recursos nomeados, cache e segurança integrados, encaminhamento eficaz e outros. Um dos segmentos de uso da Internet que mais se expandiu é a computação na edge. A aplicação das novas arquiteturas à computação na edge tem muitos benefícios. As vantagens de usar Named Data Networking (NDN), uma implementação de ICN, no contexto da computação na edge foram examinadas nesta dissertação. Execução remota e offloading de funções para a rede são focos principais deste trabalho. É proposto um framework para viabilizar a execução remota e a sua aplicação para offloading de funções na edge em NDN. Novos métodos para entregar argumentos de entrada para funções e obter o resultado da execução foram estudados. O sistema é validado e o seu desempenho é avaliado.Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic

Decoupling Information and Connectivity via Information-Centric Transport

The power of Information-Centric Networking architectures (ICNs) lies in their abstraction for communication --- the request for named data. This abstraction was popularized by the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as an application-layer abstraction, and was extended by ICNs to also serve as their network-layer abstraction. In recent years, network mechanisms for ICNs, such as scalable name-based forwarding, named-data routing and in-network caching, have been widely explored and researched. However, to the best of our knowledge, the impact of this network abstraction on ICN applications has not been explored or well understood. The motivation of this dissertation is to address this research gap. Presumably, shifting from the IP\u27s channel abstraction, in which two endpoints must establish a channel to communicate, to the request for named data abstraction in ICNs, should simplify application mechanisms. This is not only because those mechanisms are no longer required to translate named-based requests to addresses of endpoints, but mainly because application mechanisms are no longer coupled with the connectivity characteristics of the channel. Hence, applications do not need to worry if there is a synchronous end-to-end path between two endpoints, or if a device along the path switches between concurrent interfaces for communication. Therefore, ICN architectures present a new and powerful promise to applications --- the freedom to stay in the information plane decoupled from connectivity. This dissertation shows that despite this powerful promise, the information and connectivity planes are presently coupled in today\u27s incarnations of leading ICNs by a core architectural component, the forwarding strategy. Therefore, this dissertation defines the role of forwarding strategies, and it introduces Information-Centric Transport (ICT) as a new architectural component that application developers can rely on if they want their application to be decoupled from connectivity. When discussing the role of ICT, we explain the importance of in-network transport mechanisms in ICNs, and we explore how those mechanisms can be scalable when generalized to provide broadly-applicable application needs. To illustrate our contribution concretely, we present three group communication abstractions that can evolve into ICTs: 1) Data synchronization of named data. This abstraction supports applications that want to maintain data consistency over time of a group\u27s shared dataset. 2) Push-like notifications for the latest named data. This abstraction supports applications that want to quickly notify and be notified about the latest content that was produced by a member(s) in the group. And 3) distributed named data fetching when the content is partitioned. This abstraction supports applications that their named data is partitioned and distributed in the group, and the names of content items in a partition cannot be generalized and hierarchically represented using one partition name. For each ICT, we provide examples of known applications that can use it, we discuss different mechanisms for implementation, and we evaluate selected implementations. We show how by relying on an ICT instead of a forwarding strategy, the tested applications can maintain sustainable communication in connectivities where IP tools fail or do not work well