PiCasso: enabling information-centric multi-tenancy at the edge of community mesh networks

© 2019 Elsevier. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Edge computing is radically shaping the way Internet services are run by enabling computations to be available close to the users - thus mitigating the latency and performance challenges faced in today’s Internet infrastructure. Emerging markets, rural and remote communities are further away from the cloud and edge computing has indeed become an essential panacea. Many solutions have been recently proposed to facilitate efficient service delivery in edge data centers. However, we argue that those solutions cannot fully support the operations in Community Mesh Networks (CMNs) since the network connection may be less reliable and exhibit variable performance. In this paper, we propose to leverage lightweight virtualisation, Information-Centric Networking (ICN), and service deployment algorithms to overcome these limitations. The proposal is implemented in the PiCasso system, which utilises in-network caching and name based routing of ICN, combined with our HANET (HArdware and NETwork Resources) service deployment heuristic, to optimise the forwarding path of service delivery in a network zone. We analyse the data collected from the Guifi.net Sants network zone, to develop a smart heuristic for the service deployment in that zone. Through a real deployment in Guifi.net, we show that HANET improves the response time up to 53% and 28.7% for stateless and stateful services respectively. PiCasso achieves 43% traffic reduction on service delivery in our real deployment, compared to the traditional host-centric communication. The overall effect of our ICN platform is that most content and service delivery requests can be satisfied very close to the client device, many times just one hop away, decoupling QoS from intra-network traffic and origin server load.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

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