Information-centric communication in mobile and wireless networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a new communication paradigm that has been proposed to cope with drawbacks of host-based communication protocols, namely scalability and security. In this thesis, we base our work on Named Data Networking (NDN), which is a popular ICN architecture, and investigate NDN in the context of wireless and mobile ad hoc networks. In a first part, we focus on NDN efficiency (and potential improvements) in wireless environments by investigating NDN in wireless one-hop communication, i.e., without any routing protocols. A basic requirement to initiate informationcentric communication is the knowledge of existing and available content names. Therefore, we develop three opportunistic content discovery algorithms and evaluate them in diverse scenarios for different node densities and content distributions. After content names are known, requesters can retrieve content opportunistically from any neighbor node that provides the content. However, in case of short contact times to content sources, content retrieval may be disrupted. Therefore, we develop a requester application that keeps meta information of disrupted content retrievals and enables resume operations when a new content source has been found. Besides message efficiency, we also evaluate power consumption of information-centric broadcast and unicast communication. Based on our findings, we develop two mechanisms to increase efficiency of information-centric wireless one-hop communication. The first approach called Dynamic Unicast (DU) avoids broadcast communication whenever possible since broadcast transmissions result in more duplicate Data transmissions, lower data rates and higher energy consumption on mobile nodes, which are not interested in overheard Data, compared to unicast communication. Hence, DU uses broadcast communication only until a content source has been found and then retrieves content directly via unicast from the same source. The second approach called RC-NDN targets efficiency of wireless broadcast communication by reducing the number of duplicate Data transmissions. In particular, RC-NDN is a Data encoding scheme for content sources that increases diversity in wireless broadcast transmissions such that multiple concurrent requesters can profit from each others’ (overheard) message transmissions. If requesters and content sources are not in one-hop distance to each other, requests need to be forwarded via multi-hop routing. Therefore, in a second part of this thesis, we investigate information-centric wireless multi-hop communication. First, we consider multi-hop broadcast communication in the context of rather static community networks. We introduce the concept of preferred forwarders, which relay Interest messages slightly faster than non-preferred forwarders to reduce redundant duplicate message transmissions. While this approach works well in static networks, the performance may degrade in mobile networks if preferred forwarders may regularly move away. Thus, to enable routing in mobile ad hoc networks, we extend DU for multi-hop communication. Compared to one-hop communication, multi-hop DU requires efficient path update mechanisms (since multi-hop paths may expire quickly) and new forwarding strategies to maintain NDN benefits (request aggregation and caching) such that only a few messages need to be transmitted over the entire end-to-end path even in case of multiple concurrent requesters. To perform quick retransmission in case of collisions or other transmission errors, we implement and evaluate retransmission timers from related work and compare them to CCNTimer, which is a new algorithm that enables shorter content retrieval times in information-centric wireless multi-hop communication. Yet, in case of intermittent connectivity between requesters and content sources, multi-hop routing protocols may not work because they require continuous end-to-end paths. Therefore, we present agent-based content retrieval (ACR) for delay-tolerant networks. In ACR, requester nodes can delegate content retrieval to mobile agent nodes, which move closer to content sources, can retrieve content and return it to requesters. Thus, ACR exploits the mobility of agent nodes to retrieve content from remote locations. To enable delay-tolerant communication via agents, retrieved content needs to be stored persistently such that requesters can verify its authenticity via original publisher signatures. To achieve this, we develop a persistent caching concept that maintains received popular content in repositories and deletes unpopular content if free space is required. Since our persistent caching concept can complement regular short-term caching in the content store, it can also be used for network caching to store popular delay-tolerant content at edge routers (to reduce network traffic and improve network performance) while real-time traffic can still be maintained and served from the content store

Improving Resilience of Communication in Information Dissemination for Time-Critical Applications

Severe weather impacts life and in this dire condition, people rely on communication, to organize relief and stay in touch with their loved ones. In such situations, cellular network infrastructure\footnote{We refer to cellular network infrastructure as infrastructure for the entirety of this document} might be affected due to power outage, link failures, etc. This urges us to look at Ad-hoc mode of communication, to offload major traffic partially or fully from the infrastructure, depending on the status of it. We look into threefold approach, ranging from the case where the infrastructure is completely unavailable, to where it has been replaced by make shift low capacity mobile cellular base station. First, we look into communication without infrastructure and timely, dissemination of weather alerts specific to geographical areas. We look into the specific case of floods as they affect significant number of people. Due to the nature of the problem we can utilize the properties of Information Centric Networking (ICN) in this context, namely: i) Flexibility and high failure resistance: Any node in the network that has the information can satisfy the query ii) Robust: Only sensor and car need to communicate iii) Fine grained geo-location specific information dissemination. We analyze how message forwarding using ICN on top of Ad hoc network, approach compares to the one based on infrastructure, that is less resilient in the case of disaster. In addition, we compare the performance of different message forwarding strategies in VANETs (Vehicular Adhoc Networks) using ICN. Our results show that ICN strategy outperforms the infrastructure-based approach as it is 100 times faster for 63\% of total messages delivered. Then we look into the case where we have the cellular network infrastructure, but it is being pressured due to rapid increase in volume of network traffic (as seen during a major event) or it has been replaced by low capacity mobile tower. In this case we look at offloading as much traffic as possible from the infrastructure to device-to-device communication. However, the host-oriented model of the TCP/IP-based Internet poses challenges to this communication pattern. A scheme that uses an ICN model to fetch content from nearby peers, increases the resiliency of the network in cases of outages and disasters. We collected content popularity statistics from social media to create a content request pattern and evaluate our approach through the simulation of realistic urban scenarios. Additionally, we analyze the scenario of large crowds in sports venues. Our simulation results show that we can offload traffic from the backhaul network by up to 51.7\%, suggesting an advantageous path to support the surge in traffic while keeping complexity and cost for the network operator at manageable levels. Finally, we look at adaptive bit-rate streaming (ABR) streaming, which has contributed significantly to the reduction of video playout stalling, mainly in highly variable bandwidth conditions. ABR clients continue to suffer from the variation of bit rate qualities over the duration of a streaming session. Similar to stalling, these variations in bit rate quality have a negative impact on the users’ Quality of Experience (QoE). We use a trace from a large-scale CDN to show that such quality changes occur in a significant amount of streaming sessions and investigate an ABR video segment retransmission approach to reduce the number of such quality changes. As the new HTTP/2 standard is becoming increasingly popular, we also see an increase in the usage of HTTP/2 as an alternative protocol for the transmission of web traffic including video streaming. Using various network conditions, we conduct a systematic comparison of existing transport layer approaches for HTTP/2 that is best suited for ABR segment retransmissions. Since it is well known that both protocols provide a series of improvements over HTTP/1.1, we perform experiments both in controlled environments and over transcontinental links in the Internet and find that these benefits also “trickle up” into the application layer when it comes to ABR video streaming where HTTP/2 retransmissions can significantly improve the average quality bitrate while simultaneously minimizing bit rate variations over the duration of a streaming session. Taking inspiration from the first two approaches, we take into account the resiliency of a multi-path approach and further look at a multi-path and multi-stream approach to ABR streaming and demonstrate that losses on one path have very little impact on the other from the same multi-path connection and this increases throughput and resiliency of communication

Encaminhamento baseado no contexto em ICNs móveis

Over the last couple of decades, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been at the forefront of research, yet still are afflicted by high network fragmentation, due to their continuous node mobility and geographical dispersion. To address these concerns, a new paradigm was proposed - Information-Centric Networks(ICN), whose focus is the delivery of Content based on names, being ideal to attend to high latency environments. However, the main proposed solutions for content delivery in ICNs do not take into account the type of content nor the various available communication interfaces in each point of the network, a factor which can be deciding in mobile networks. The scope of this dissertation lies on the use of ICNs concepts for the delivery of both urgent and non-urgent information in urban mobile environments. In order to do so, a context-based forwarding strategy was proposed, with a very clear goal: to take advantage of both packet names and Data, and node's neighborhood analysis in order to successfully deliver content into the network in the shortest period of time, and without worsening network congestion. The design, implementation and validation of the proposed strategy was performed using the ndnSIM platform simulator along with real mobility traces from communication infrastructure of the Porto city. The results show that the proposed context-based forwarding strategy for mobile ICN presents a clear improvement in performance in terms of delivery, while maintaining network overhead at a constant. Furthermore, by means of better pathing and through cooperation with caching mechanisms, lower transmission delays can be attained.Nas últimas décadas, as redes veiculares ad hoc (VANETs) estiveram na vanguarda da pesquisa, mas continuam a ser afetadas por alta fragmentação na rede, devido à mobilidade contínua dos nós e a sua dispersão geográfica. Para abordar estes problemas, um novo paradigma foi proposto - Redes Centradas na Informação (ICN), cujo foco é a entrega de Conteúdo com base em nomes, sendo ideal para atender ambientes de alta latência. No entanto, as principais soluções propostas para entrega de conteúdo em ICNs não têm em conta o tipo de conteúdo nem as várias interfaces de comunicação disponíveis em cada ponto da rede, fator que pode ser determinante em redes móveis. O objetivo desta dissertação reside no uso dos conceitos de ICNs para a entrega de informações urgentes e não urgentes em ambientes móveis urbanos. Para isso, foi proposta uma estratégia de encaminhamento baseada em contexto, com um objetivo muito claro: tirar proveito do nome e dados dos pacotes, e da análise de vizinhança dos nós, com vista em fornecer com êxito o conteúdo para a rede no menor período de tempo e sem piorar o congestionamento da rede. O desenho, implementação e validação da estratégia proposta foram realizados usando o simulador ndnSIM, juntamente com traces reais de mobilidade da infraestrutura de comunicação da cidade do Porto. Os resultados mostram que a estratégia de encaminhamento baseada em contexto proposta para o ICN móvel apresenta uma clara melhoria no desempenho em termos de entrega, mantendo a carga da rede constante. Além disso, através da escolha de melhores caminhos e através da cooperação com mecanismos de armazenamento em cache, é possível alcançar atrasos de transmissão mais baixos.Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic

Temporary Redundant Transmission Mechanism for SCTP Multihomed Hosts

In SCTP’s Concurrent Multipath Transfer, if data is sent to the destined IP(s) without knowledge of the paths condition, packets may be lost or delayed. This is because of the bursty nature of IP traffic and physical damage to the network. To offset these problems, network path status is examined using our new mechanism Multipath State Aware Concurrent Multipath Transfer using redundant transmission (MSACMT-RTv2). Here the status of multiple paths is analyzed, initially and periodically thereafter transmitted. After examination, paths priority is assigned before transmission. One path is temporarily employed as redundant path for the failure-expected path (FEP); this redundant path is used for transmitting redundant data. At the end of predefined period, reliability of the FEP is confirmed. If FEP is ensured to be reliable, temporary path is transformed into normal CMT path. MSACMT-RTv2 algorithm is simulated using the Delaware University ns-2 SCTP/CMT module (ns-2; V2.29). We present and discuss MSACMT-RTv2 performance in asymmetric path delay and with finite receiver buffer (rbuf) size. We extended our experiment to test robustness of this algorithm and inferred exhaustive result. It is inferred that our algorithm outperforms better in terms of increasing the throughput and reducing the latency than existing system

Consumer mobility awareness in named data networks

Mobile data traffic has increased significantly due to the evolution of wireless communication technologies. The Information Centric Network paradigm is considered as an alternative to bypass the restrictions imposed by the traditional IP networks, especially those related with the mobility of its users. Despite the potential advantages of this paradigm regarding mobile wireless environments, several research challenges remain unaddressed, more specifically the ones related with the communication damage caused by handovers. This work presents a Named Data Network (NDN) based solution that supports Consumer mobility. The proposed scheme addresses a mobility manager entity that monitors and anticipates trajectories, while compelling the infrastructure to adjust to the new paths. This process results in an efficient way to manage the Consumers' mobility, and therefore, in a better quality of service to its users. The implementation and evaluation of the proposed solution uses the ndnSIM, through functional and non-functional scenarios, and with real traces of urban vehicular mobility and connectivity. The results show that the proposed solution is superior to the native NDN workflow with respect to content delivery ratio and number of timeouts.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Network layer access control for context-aware IPv6 applications

As part of the Lancaster GUIDE II project, we have developed a novel wireless access point protocol designed to support the development of next generation mobile context-aware applications in our local environs. Once deployed, this architecture will allow ordinary citizens secure, accountable and convenient access to a set of tailored applications including location, multimedia and context based services, and the public Internet. Our architecture utilises packet marking and network level packet filtering techniques within a modified Mobile IPv6 protocol stack to perform access control over a range of wireless network technologies. In this paper, we describe the rationale for, and components of, our architecture and contrast our approach with other state-of-the- art systems. The paper also contains details of our current implementation work, including preliminary performance measurements

eHDDP: Enhanced Hybrid Domain Discovery Protocol for network topologies with both wired/wireless and SDN/non-SDN devices

Handling efficiently both wired and/or wireless devices in SDN networks is still an open issue. eHDDP comes as an enhanced version of the Hybrid Domain Discovery Protocol (HDDP) that allows the SDN control plane to discover and manage hybrid topologies composed by both SDN and non-SDN devices with wired and/or wireless interfaces, thus opening a path for the integration of IoT and SDN networks. Moreover, the proposal is also able to detect both unidirectional and bidirectional links between wireless devices. eHDDP has been thoroughly evaluated in different scenarios and exhibits good scalability properties since the number of required messages is proportional to the number of existing links in the network topology. Moreover, the obtained discovery and processing times give the opportunity to support scenarios with low mobility devices since the discovery times are in the range of hundreds of milliseconds.Comunidad de MadridJunta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Manch