Making Name-Based Content Routing More Efficient than Link-State Routing

The Diffusive Name-based Routing Protocol (DNRP) is introduced for efficient name-based routing in information-centric networks (ICN). DNRP establishes and maintains multiple loop-free routes to the nearest instances of a name prefix using only distance information. DNRP eliminates the need for periodic updates, maintaining topology information, storing complete paths to content replicas, or knowing about all the sites storing replicas of named content. DNRP is suitable for large ICNs with large numbers of prefixes stored at multiple sites. It is shown that DNRP provides loop-free routes to content independently of the state of the topology and that it converges within a finite time to correct routes to name prefixes after arbitrary changes in the network topology or the placement of prefix instances. The result of simulation experiments illustrates that DNRP is more efficient than link-state routing approaches

Content-Centric Networking at Internet Scale through The Integration of Name Resolution and Routing

We introduce CCN-RAMP (Routing to Anchors Matching Prefixes), a new approach to content-centric networking. CCN-RAMP offers all the advantages of the Named Data Networking (NDN) and Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) but eliminates the need to either use Pending Interest Tables (PIT) or lookup large Forwarding Information Bases (FIB) listing name prefixes in order to forward Interests. CCN-RAMP uses small forwarding tables listing anonymous sources of Interests and the locations of name prefixes. Such tables are immune to Interest-flooding attacks and are smaller than the FIBs used to list IP address ranges in the Internet. We show that no forwarding loops can occur with CCN-RAMP, and that Interests flow over the same routes that NDN and CCNx would maintain using large FIBs. The results of simulation experiments comparing NDN with CCN-RAMP based on ndnSIM show that CCN-RAMP requires forwarding state that is orders of magnitude smaller than what NDN requires, and attains even better performance

Modeling Data-Plane Power Consumption of Future Internet Architectures

With current efforts to design Future Internet Architectures (FIAs), the evaluation and comparison of different proposals is an interesting research challenge. Previously, metrics such as bandwidth or latency have commonly been used to compare FIAs to IP networks. We suggest the use of power consumption as a metric to compare FIAs. While low power consumption is an important goal in its own right (as lower energy use translates to smaller environmental impact as well as lower operating costs), power consumption can also serve as a proxy for other metrics such as bandwidth and processor load. Lacking power consumption statistics about either commodity FIA routers or widely deployed FIA testbeds, we propose models for power consumption of FIA routers. Based on our models, we simulate scenarios for measuring power consumption of content delivery in different FIAs. Specifically, we address two questions: 1) which of the proposed FIA candidates achieves the lowest energy footprint; and 2) which set of design choices yields a power-efficient network architecture? Although the lack of real-world data makes numerous assumptions necessary for our analysis, we explore the uncertainty of our calculations through sensitivity analysis of input parameters

An Experimental Investigation of Hyperbolic Routing with a Smart Forwarding Plane in NDN

Routing in NDN networks must scale in terms of forwarding table size and routing protocol overhead. Hyperbolic routing (HR) presents a potential solution to address the routing scalability problem, because it does not use traditional forwarding tables or exchange routing updates upon changes in network topologies. Although HR has the drawbacks of producing sub-optimal routes or local minima for some destinations, these issues can be mitigated by NDN's intelligent data forwarding plane. However, HR's viability still depends on both the quality of the routes HR provides and the overhead incurred at the forwarding plane due to HR's sub-optimal behavior. We designed a new forwarding strategy called Adaptive Smoothed RTT-based Forwarding (ASF) to mitigate HR's sub-optimal path selection. This paper describes our experimental investigation into the packet delivery delay and overhead under HR as compared with Named-Data Link State Routing (NLSR), which calculates shortest paths. We run emulation experiments using various topologies with different failure scenarios, probing intervals, and maximum number of next hops for a name prefix. Our results show that HR's delay stretch has a median close to 1 and a 95th-percentile around or below 2, which does not grow with the network size. HR's message overhead in dynamic topologies is nearly independent of the network size, while NLSR's overhead grows polynomially at least. These results suggest that HR offers a more scalable routing solution with little impact on the optimality of routing paths

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