Hierarchical Content Stores in High-speed ICN Routers: Emulation and Prototype Implementation

Recent work motivates the design of Information-centric rou-ters that make use of hierarchies of memory to jointly scale in the size and speed of content stores. The present paper advances this understanding by (i) instantiating a general purpose two-layer packet-level caching system, (ii) investigating the solution design space via emulation, and (iii) introducing a proof-of-concept prototype. The emulation-based study reveals insights about the broad design space, the expected impact of workload, and gains due to multi-threaded execution. The full-blown system prototype experimentally confirms that, by exploiting both DRAM and SSD memory technologies, ICN routers can sustain cache operations in excess of 10Gbps running on off-the-shelf hardware

Flexpop: A popularity-based caching strategy for multimedia applications in information-centric networking

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is the dominant architecture for the future Internet. In ICN, the content items are stored temporarily in network nodes such as routers. When the memory of routers becomes full and there is no room for a new arriving content, the stored contents are evicted to cope with the limited cache size of the routers. Therefore, it is crucial to develop an effective caching strategy for keeping popular contents for a longer period of time. This study proposes a new caching strategy, named Flexible Popularity-based Caching (FlexPop) for storing popular contents. The FlexPop comprises two mechanisms, i.e., Content Placement Mechanism (CPM), which is responsible for content caching, and Content Eviction Mechanism (CEM) that deals with content eviction when the router cache is full and there is no space for the new incoming content. Both mechanisms are validated using Fuzzy Set Theory, following the Design Research Methodology (DRM) to manifest that the research is rigorous and repeatable under comparable conditions. The performance of FlexPop is evaluated through simulations and the results are compared with those of the Leave Copy Everywhere (LCE), ProbCache, and Most Popular Content (MPC) strategies. The results show that the FlexPop strategy outperforms LCE, ProbCache, and MPC with respect to cache hit rate, redundancy, content retrieval delay, memory utilization, and stretch ratio, which are regarded as extremely important metrics (in various studies) for the evaluation of ICN caching. The outcomes exhibited in this study are noteworthy in terms of making FlexPop acceptable to users as they can verify the performance of ICN before selecting the right caching strategy. Thus FlexPop has potential in the use of ICN for the future Internet such as in deployment of the IoT technology

Multi-Terabyte and multi-Gbps information centric routers

One of the main research directions along which the future Internet is evolving can be identified in the paradigmatic shift from a network of hosts toward a network of caches. Yet, several questions remain concerning the scalability of individual algorithms (e.g., name based lookup and routing) and components (e.g., caches) of these novel Information Centric Networking (ICN) architectures. Exploiting a peculiar characteristics of ICN (i.e., the fact that contents are split in chunks), and the nature of video streaming (which dominates Internet traffic), this paper proposes a novel two-layers caching scheme that allows multi-Terabyte caches to sustain content streaming at multi-Gbps speed. We model the system as an extension, to the case of chunked contents, of the well known Che approximation, that has the advantage of being very simple and accurate at the same time. Simulations under synthetic and realistic t

Multi-Terabyte and Multi-Gbps Information Centric Routers

International audienceOne of the main research directions along which the future Internet is evolving can be identified in the paradigmatic shift from a network of hosts toward a network of caches. Yet, several questions remain concerning the scalability of individual algorithms (e.g., name based lookup and routing) and components (e.g., caches) of these novel Information Centric Networking (ICN) architectures. Exploiting a peculiar characteristics of ICN (i.e., the fact that contents are split in chunks), and the nature of video streaming (which dominates Internet traffic), this paper proposes a novel two-layers caching scheme that allows multi-Terabyte caches to sustain content streaming at multi-Gbps speed. We model the system as an extension, to the case of chunked contents, of the well known Che approximation, that has the advantage of being very simple and accurate at the same time.Simulations under synthetic and realistic trace-driven traffic confirm the accuracy of the analysis and thefeasibility of the proposed architecture

Paralelizando unidades de cache hierárquicas para roteadores ICN

Um desafio fundamental em ICN (do inglês Information-Centric Networking) é desenvolver Content Stores (ou seja, unidades de cache) que satisfaçam três requisitos: espaço de armazenamento grande, velocidade de operação rápida e custo acessível. A chamada Hierarchical Content Store (HCS) é uma abordagem promissora para atender a esses requisitos. Ela explora a correlação temporal entre requisições para prever futuras solicitações. Por exemplo, assume-se que um usuário que solicita o primeiro minuto de um filme também solicitará o segundo minuto. Teoricamente, essa premissa permitiria transferir proativamente conteúdos de uma área de cache relativamente grande, mas lenta (Layer 2 - L2), para uma área de cache mais rápida, porém menor (Layer 1 - L1). A estrutura hierárquica tem potencial para incrementar o desempenho da CS em uma ordem de grandeza tanto em termos de vazão como de tamanho, mantendo o custo. Contudo, o desenvolvimento de HCS apresenta diversos desafios práticos. É necessário acoplar as hierarquias de memória L2 e L1 considerando as suas taxas de transferência e tamanhos, que dependem tanto de aspectos de hardware (por exemplo, taxa de leitura da L2, uso de múltiplos SSD físicos em paralelo, velocidade de barramento, etc.), como de software (por exemplo, controlador do SSD, gerenciamento de memória, etc.). Nesse contexto, esta tese apresenta duas contribuições principais. Primeiramente, é proposta uma arquitetura para superar os gargalos inerentes ao sistema através da paralelização de múltiplas HCS. Em resumo, o esquema proposto supera desafios inerentes à concorrência (especificamente, sincronismo) através do particionamento determinístico das requisições de conteúdos entre múltiplas threads. Em segundo lugar, é proposta uma metodologia para investigar o desenvolvimento de HCS explorando técnicas de emulação e modelagem analítica conjuntamente. A metodologia proposta apresenta vantagens em relação a metodologias baseadas em prototipação e simulação. A L2 é emulada para viabilizar a investigação de uma variedade de cenários de contorno (tanto em termos de hardware como de software) maior do que seria possível através de prototipação (considerando as tecnologias atuais). Além disso, a emulação emprega código real de um protótipo para os outros componentes do HCS (por exemplo L1, gerência das camadas e API) para fornecer resultados mais realistas do que seriam obtidos através de simulação.A key challenge in Information Centric Networking (ICN) is to develop cache units (also called Content Store - CS) that meet three requirements: large storage space, fast operation, and affordable cost. The so-called HCS (Hierarchical Content Store) is a promising approach to satisfy these requirements jointly. It explores the correlation between content requests to predict future demands. Theoretically, this idea would enable proactively content transfers from a relatively large but slow cache area (Layer 2 - L2) to a faster but smaller cache area (Layer 1 - L1). Thereby, it would be possible to increase the throughput and size of CS in one order of magnitude, while keeping the cost. However, the development of HCS introduces several practical challenges. HCS requires a careful coupling of L2 and L1 memory levels considering their transfer rates and sizes. This requirement depends on both hardware specifications (e.g., read rate L2, use of multiple physical SSD in parallel, bus speed, etc.), and software aspects (e.g., the SSD controller, memory management, etc.). In this context, this thesis presents two main contributions. First, we propose an architecture for overcoming the HCS bottlenecks by parallelizing multiple HCS. In summary, the proposed scheme overcomes racing condition related challenges through deterministic partitioning of content requests among multiple threads. Second, we propose a methodology to investigate the development of HCS exploiting emulation techniques and analytical modeling jointly. The proposed methodology offers advantages over prototyping and simulation-based methods. We emulate the L2 to enable the investigation of a variety of boundary scenarios that are richer (regarding both hardware and software aspects) than would be possible through prototyping (considering current technologies). Moreover, the emulation employs real code from a prototype for the other components of the HCS (e.g., L1, layers management and API) to provide more realistic results than would be obtained through simulation