Joint hop-by-hop and receiver-driven interest control protocol for content-centric networks

Content-centric networking (CCN) advocates a new trans-port model tailored to named-data communication. Three features distinguish CCN transport from the TCP/IP model: unique endpoint at the receiver, pull-based data retrieval in a point to multi-point fashion and in-path caching. The definition of transport control mechanisms is of fun-damental importance within the CCN architectural design and beyond, in the broader scope of information-centric net-works. In this work, we propose a joint Hop-by-hop and Receiver-driven Interest Control Protocol (HR-ICP) to reg-ulate user requests (Interests) either at the receiver and at intermediate nodes via Interest shaping. We prove that HR-ICP is stable and converges to an efficient and max-min fair equilibrium. Compared to controlling traffic only at the re-ceiver, HR-ICP accelerates congestion reaction and reduces the loss rate, as we show by means of CCN packet-level sim-ulations. In different network scenarios, we highlight the advantages of our solution in terms of faster convergence to the optimal throughput, robustness against misbehaving re-ceivers and flow protection of delay-sensitive applications

Backscatter from the Data Plane --- Threats to Stability and Security in Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking proposals attract much attention in the ongoing search for a future communication paradigm of the Internet. Replacing the host-to-host connectivity by a data-oriented publish/subscribe service eases content distribution and authentication by concept, while eliminating threats from unwanted traffic at an end host as are common in today's Internet. However, current approaches to content routing heavily rely on data-driven protocol events and thereby introduce a strong coupling of the control to the data plane in the underlying routing infrastructure. In this paper, threats to the stability and security of the content distribution system are analyzed in theory and practical experiments. We derive relations between state resources and the performance of routers and demonstrate how this coupling can be misused in practice. We discuss new attack vectors present in its current state of development, as well as possibilities and limitations to mitigate them.Comment: 15 page

EC-CENTRIC: An Energy- and Context-Centric Perspective on IoT Systems and Protocol Design

The radio transceiver of an IoT device is often where most of the energy is consumed. For this reason, most research so far has focused on low power circuit and energy efficient physical layer designs, with the goal of reducing the average energy per information bit required for communication. While these efforts are valuable per se, their actual effectiveness can be partially neutralized by ill-designed network, processing and resource management solutions, which can become a primary factor of performance degradation, in terms of throughput, responsiveness and energy efficiency. The objective of this paper is to describe an energy-centric and context-aware optimization framework that accounts for the energy impact of the fundamental functionalities of an IoT system and that proceeds along three main technical thrusts: 1) balancing signal-dependent processing techniques (compression and feature extraction) and communication tasks; 2) jointly designing channel access and routing protocols to maximize the network lifetime; 3) providing self-adaptability to different operating conditions through the adoption of suitable learning architectures and of flexible/reconfigurable algorithms and protocols. After discussing this framework, we present some preliminary results that validate the effectiveness of our proposed line of action, and show how the use of adaptive signal processing and channel access techniques allows an IoT network to dynamically tune lifetime for signal distortion, according to the requirements dictated by the application

CCTCP: A scalable receiver-driven congestion control protocol for content centric networking

Abstract—Content Centric Networking (CCN) is a recently proposed information-centric Internet architecture in which the main network abstraction is represented by location-agnostic content identifiers instead of node identifiers. In CCN each content object is divided into packet-size chunks. When a content object is transferred, routers on the path can cache single chunks which they can use to serve subsequent requests from other users. Since content chunks in CCN may be retrieved from a number of different nodes/caches, implicit-feedback transport protocols will not be able to work efficiently, because it is not possible to set an appropriate timeout value based on RTT estimations given that the data source may change frequently during a flow. In order to address this problem, we propose in this paper a scalable, implicit-feedback congestion control protocol, capable of coping with RTT unpredictability using a novel anticipated interests mechanism to predict the location of chunks before they are actually served. Our evaluation shows that our protocol outperforms similar receiver-driven protocols, in particular when content chunks are scattered across network paths due to reduced cache sizes, long-tail content popularity distribution or the adoption of specific caching policies. I