IP Over ICN Goes Live

Information-centric networking (ICN) has long been advocating for radical changes to the IP-based Internet. However, the upgrade challenges that this entails have hindered ICN adoption. To break this loop, the POINT project proposed a hybrid, IP-over-ICN, architecture: IP networks are preserved at the edge, connected to each other over an ICN core. This exploits the key benefits of ICN, enabling individual network operators to improve the performance of their IP-based services, without changing the rest of the Internet. We provide an overview of POINT and outline how it improves upon IP in terms of performance and resilience. Our focus is on the successful trial of the POINT prototype in a production network, where real users operated actual IP-based applications

Coexistence of ICN and IP networks: an NFV as a service approach

International audienceIn contrast to the current host-centric architecture, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) adopts content naming instead of host address and in-network caching to enhance the content delivery, improve the data distribution, and satisfy users' requirements. As ICN is being incrementally deployed in different real-world scenarios, it will exist with IP-based services in a hybrid network setting. Full deployment of ICN and total replacement of IP protocol is not feasible at the current stage since IP is dominating the Internet. On the other hand, redesigning TCP/IP applications from ICN perspective is a time-consuming task and requires a careful investigation from both business and technical point of view. Thus, the coexistence of ICN and IP is one of the suitable solutions. Towards this end, we propose a simple yet efficient coexistence solution based on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology. We define a set of communication regions and control virtual functions. A gateway node is used as an intermediate entity to fetch and deliver content over regions. The simulation results show that the proposed approach is valid and allow content fetching and delivering from different ICN and/to IP regions in an efficient manner

A software-defined networking solution for interconnecting network functions in service-based architectures

Mobile core networks handle critical control functions for delivering services in modern cellular networks. Traditional point-to-point architectures, where network functions are directly connected through standardized interfaces, are being substituted by service-based architectures (SBAs), where core functionalities are finer-grained microservices decoupled from the underlying infrastructure. In this way, network functions and services can be distributed, with scaling and fail-over mechanisms, and can be dynamically deployed, updated, or removed to support slicing. A myriad of network functions can be deployed or removed according to traffic flows, thereby increasing the complexity of connection management. In this context, 3GPP Release 16 defines the service communication proxy (SCP) as a unified communication interface for a set of network functions. In this paper, we propose a novel software-defined networking (SDN)-based solution with the same role for a service mesh architecture where network functions can be deployed anywhere in the infrastructure. We demonstrated its efficiency in comparison with alternative architectures.La Caixa Foundation | Ref. LCF/BQ/ES18/11670020Agencia Estatal de Investigación | Ref. PID2020-116329GB-C21Agencia Estatal de Investigación | Ref. PDC2021-121335-C2

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

Proactive content caching in future generation communication networks: Energy and security considerations

The proliferation of hand-held devices and Internet of Things (IoT) applications has heightened demand for popular content download. A high volume of content streaming/downloading services during peak hours can cause network congestion. Proactive content caching has emerged as a prospective solution to tackle this congestion problem. In proactive content caching, data storage units are used to store popular content in helper nodes at the network edge. This contributes to a reduction of peak traffic load and network congestion. However, data storage units require additional energy, which offers a challenge to researchers that intend to reduce energy consumption up to 90% in next generation networks. This thesis presents proactive content caching techniques to reduce grid energy consumption by utilizing renewable energy sources to power-up data storage units in helper nodes. The integration of renewable energy sources with proactive caching is a significant challenge due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources and investment costs. In this thesis, this challenge is tackled by introducing strategies to determine the optimal time of the day for content caching and optimal scheduling of caching nodes. The proposed strategies consider not only the availability of renewable energy but also temporal changes in network trac to reduce associated energy costs. While proactive caching can facilitate the reduction of peak trac load and the integration of renewable energy, cached content objects at helper nodes are often more vulnerable to malicious attacks due to less stringent security at edge nodes. Potential content leakage can lead to catastrophic consequences, particularly for cache-equipped Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. In this thesis, the concept of \trusted caching nodes (TCNs) is introduced. TCNs cache popular content objects and provide security services to connected links. The proposed study optimally allocates TCNs and selects the most suitable content forwarding paths. Furthermore, a caching strategy is designed for mobile edge computing systems to support IoT task offloading. The strategy optimally assigns security resources to offloaded tasks while satisfying their individual requirements. However, security measures often contribute to overheads in terms of both energy consumption and delay. Consequently, in this thesis, caching techniques have been designed to investigate the trade-off between energy consumption and probable security breaches. Overall, this thesis contributes to the current literature by simultaneously investigating energy and security aspects of caching systems whilst introducing solutions to relevant research problems

Improving video QoE with IP over ICN

Information-centric networking (ICN) has long been advocating for radical changes to the Internet, but the upgrade challenges that this entails have hindered its adoption. To break this loop, the POINT project proposed a hybrid, IP-over-ICN, architecture: IP networks are preserved at the edge, connected to each other over an ICN core. This exploits the key benefits of ICN, enabling individual network operators to improve the performance of their IP-based services, without changing the rest of the Internet. This paper first provides an overview of POINT and outlines how it can improve upon IP in terms of performance and resilience. It then describes a trial of the POINT prototype in a production network, where real users operated actual IPbased applications. As part of the trial, we carried out experiments to evaluate the Quality of Experience (QoE) for video services offered via either HLS or IPTV, using either IP or POINT as a substrate. The results from the trial verify that the IP-over-ICN approach of POINT offers enhanced QoE to the users of these video services, compared to traditional IP, especially under exceptional network conditions

Path protection switching in information centric networking

Since its formation, the Internet has experienced tremendous growth, constantly increasing traffic and new applications, including voice and video. However, it still keeps its original architecture drafted almost 40 years ago built on the end-to-end principle; this has proven to be problematic when there are failures as routing convergence is slow for unicast networks and even slower for multicast which has to rely upon slow multicast routing as no protection switching exists for multicast}. This thesis investigates protection in an alternative approach for network communication, namely information centric networking (ICN) using the architecture proposed by the PSIRP/PURSUIT projects. This uses Bloom Filters to allow both unicast and multicast forwarding. However, the PSIRP/PURSUIT ICN approach did not investigate protection switching and this problem forms the main aim of this thesis. The work builds on the research by Grover and Stamatelakis who introduced the concept of pre-configured protection p-cycles in 2000 for optical networks and, with modification, applicable to unicast IP or packet networks. This thesis shows how the p-cycle concept can be directly applied to packet networks that use PSIRP/PURSUIT ICN and extends the approach to encompass both unicast and multicast protection switching. Furthermore, it shows how the chosen p-cycles can be optimised to reduce the redundancy overhead introduced by the protection mechanism. The work evaluates the approach from two aspects, the first is how the proposed approach compares to existing switching state and traffic in an MPLS multicast architecture. The second considers the redundancy overhead in three known network topologies for synthetic traffic matrices. The thesis is the first work to demonstrate the efficiency of Bloom filter based switching for multicast (and unicast) protection switching