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

NDNSD: Service Publishing and Discovery in NDN

Service discovery is one of the crucial components of modern applications. With the advent of several new systems such as IoT, edge, cloud, etc the world is connected more than ever and smart devices are creeping towards every nook and corner of our surroundings. Not only the new systems are emerging but also the communication pattern is evolving i.e. from one-to-one (host-host) to many-to-many (distributed application, IoT). The definition of service has also changed over time. Unlike their meaning in the past as programs running on some machines, services today can be sensor devices collecting data, mobile devices offering computing service, or it can even be a piece of data generated by some system. To satisfy the changing dynamics and heterogeneity of the services and the demand of these evolving architectures several new protocols are developed on top of the TCP/IP stack. Nonetheless, the fundamental weakness of host-centric TCP/IP to support the need for distributed application (IoT, edge) and many-to-many communication (e.g. publisher-subscriber) have induced several weaknesses in the system and have made it more fragile. Named Data Networking (NDN) is an information-centric networking architecture that does the communication over signed, named content objects. Its pub-sub style of communication, data-centric security at the network layer, in-network caching, etc provides numerous benefits to modern systems and tries to overcome the shortcoming of TCP/IP. In this thesis, we propose NDNSD – a fully distributed, scalable, and general-purpose, service discovery protocol for information-centric architecture/NDN. It is developed on top of the synchronization protocol (sync) and offers publisher-subscriber API for service publishing and discovery. We present several design features of NDNSD and also establish how it is best suited for modern systems. We also introduce the concept of service-info and how it can be combined with sync and NDN hierarchical names to make service discovery generic. Finally, To substantiate our argument, we design, implement, and evaluate our protocol, and also provide some use-cases (e.g. Building Management System) to show how service discovery can be beneficial

Managing scientific data with named data networking

Many scientific domains, such as climate science and High Energy Physics (HEP), have data management requirements that are not well supported by the IP network architecture. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new network architecture whose service model is better aligned with the needs of data-oriented applications. NDN provides features such as best-location retrieval, caching, load sharing, and transparent failover that would otherwise be painstakingly (re-)implemented by each application using point-to-point semantics in an IP network. We present the first scientific data management application designed and implemented on top of NDN. We use this application to manage climate and HEP data over a dedicated, high-performance, testbed. Our application has two main components: a UI for dataset discovery queries and a federation of synchronized name catalogs. We show how NDN primitives can be used to implement common data management operations such as publishing, search, efficient retrieval, and publication access control

Decoupling Information and Connectivity via Information-Centric Transport

The power of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures lies in their abstraction for communication --- the request for named data. This abstraction promises that applications can choose to operate only in the information plane, agnostic to the mechanisms implemented in the connectivity plane. However, despite this powerful promise, the information and connectivity planes are presently coupled in today\u27s incarnations of leading ICNs by a core architectural component, the forwarding strategy. Presently, this component is not sustainable: it implements both the information and connectivity mechanisms without specifying who should choose a forwarding strategy --- an application developer or the network operator. In practice, application developers can specify a strategy only if they understand connectivity details, while network operators can assign strategies only if they understand application expectations. In this paper, we define the role of forwarding strategies, and we introduce Information-Centric Transport (ICT) as an abstraction for cleanly decoupling the information plane from the connectivity plane. We discuss how ICTs allow applications to operate in the information plane, concerned only with namespaces and trust identities, leaving network node operators free to deploy whatever strategy mechanisms make sense for the connectivity that they manage. To illustrate the ICT concept, we demonstrate ICT-Sync and ICT-Notify. We show how these ICTs 1) enable applications to operate regardless of connectivity details, 2) are designed to satisfy a predefined set of application requirements and are free from application-specifics, and 3) can be deployed by network operators where needed, without requiring any change to the application logic