Study and analysis of mobility, security, and caching issues in CCN

Existing architecture of Internet is IP-centric, having capability to cope with the needs of the Internet users. Due to the recent advancements and emerging technologies, a need to have ubiquitous connectivity has become the primary focus. Increasing demands for location-independent content raised the requirement of a new architecture and hence it became a research challenge. Content Centric Networking (CCN) paradigm emerges as an alternative to IP-centric model and is based on name-based forwarding and in-network data caching. It is likely to address certain challenges that have not been solved by IP-based protocols in wireless networks. Three important factors that require significant research related to CCN are mobility, security, and caching. While a number of studies have been conducted on CCN and its proposed technologies, none of the studies target all three significant research directions in a single article, to the best of our knowledge. This paper is an attempt to discuss the three factors together within context of each other. In this paper, we discuss and analyze basics of CCN principles with distributed properties of caching, mobility, and secure access control. Different comparisons are made to examine the strengths and weaknesses of each aforementioned aspect in detail. The final discussion aims to identify the open research challenges and some future trends for CCN deployment on a large scale

Use of locator/identifier separation to improve the future internet routing system

The Internet evolved from its early days of being a small research network to become a critical infrastructure many organizations and individuals rely on. One dimension of this evolution is the continuous growth of the number of participants in the network, far beyond what the initial designers had in mind. While it does work today, it is widely believed that the current design of the global routing system cannot scale to accommodate future challenges. In 2006 an Internet Architecture Board (IAB) workshop was held to develop a shared understanding of the Internet routing system scalability issues faced by the large backbone operators. The participants documented in RFC 4984 their belief that "routing scalability is the most important problem facing the Internet today and must be solved." A potential solution to the routing scalability problem is ending the semantic overloading of Internet addresses, by separating node location from identity. Several proposals exist to apply this idea to current Internet addressing, among which the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) is the only one already being shipped in production routers. Separating locators from identifiers results in another level of indirection, and introduces a new problem: how to determine location, when the identity is known. The first part of our work analyzes existing proposals for systems that map identifiers to locators and proposes an alternative system, within the LISP ecosystem. We created a large-scale Internet topology simulator and used it to compare the performance of three mapping systems: LISP-DHT, LISP+ALT and the proposed LISP-TREE. We analyzed and contrasted their architectural properties as well. The monitoring projects that supplied Internet routing table growth data over a large timespan inspired us to create LISPmon, a monitoring platform aimed at collecting, storing and presenting data gathered from the LISP pilot network, early in the deployment of the LISP protocol. The project web site and collected data is publicly available and will assist researchers in studying the evolution of the LISP mapping system. We also document how the newly introduced LISP network elements fit into the current Internet, advantages and disadvantages of different deployment options, and how the proposed transition mechanism scenarios could affect the evolution of the global routing system. This work is currently available as an active Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet Draft. The second part looks at the problem of efficient one-to-many communications, assuming a routing system that implements the above mentioned locator/identifier split paradigm. We propose a network layer protocol for efficient live streaming. It is incrementally deployable, with changes required only in the same border routers that should be upgraded to support locator/identifier separation. Our proof-of-concept Linux kernel implementation shows the feasibility of the protocol, and our comparison to popular peer-to-peer live streaming systems indicates important savings in inter-domain traffic. We believe LISP has considerable potential of getting adopted, and an important aspect of this work is how it might contribute towards a better mapping system design, by showing the weaknesses of current favorites and proposing alternatives. The presented results are an important step forward in addressing the routing scalability problem described in RFC 4984, and improving the delivery of live streaming video over the Internet

Content, Topology and Cooperation in In-network Caching

In-network caching aims at improving content delivery and alleviating pressures on network bandwidth by leveraging universally networked caches. This thesis studies the design of cooperative in-network caching strategy from three perspectives: content, topology and cooperation, specifically focuses on the mechanisms of content delivery and cooperation policy and their impacts on the performance of cache networks. The main contributions of this thesis are twofold. From measurement perspective, we show that the conventional metric hit rate is not sufficient in evaluating a caching strategy on non-trivial topologies, therefore we introduce footprint reduction and coupling factor, which contain richer information. We show cooperation policy is the key in balancing various tradeoffs in caching strategy design, and further investigate the performance impact from content per se via different chunking schemes. From design perspective, we first show different caching heuristics and smart routing schemes can significantly improve the caching performance and facilitate content delivery. We then incorporate well-defined fairness metric into design and derive the unique optimal caching solution on the Pareto boundary with bargaining game framework. In addition, our study on the functional relationship between cooperation overhead and neighborhood size indicates collaboration should be constrained in a small neighborhood due to its cost growing exponentially on general network topologies.Verkonsisäinen välimuistitallennus pyrkii parantamaan sisällöntoimitusta ja helpottamaan painetta verkon siirtonopeudessa hyödyntämällä universaaleja verkottuneita välimuisteja. Tämä väitöskirja tutkii yhteistoiminnallisen verkonsisäisen välimuistitallennuksen suunnittelua kolmesta näkökulmasta: sisällön, topologian ja yhteistyön kautta, erityisesti keskittyen sisällöntoimituksen mekanismeihin ja yhteistyökäytäntöihin sekä näiden vaikutuksiin välimuistiverkkojen performanssiin. Väitöskirjan suurimmat aikaansaannokset ovat kahdella saralla. Mittaamisen näkökulmasta näytämme, että perinteinen metrinen välimuistin osumatarkkuus ei ole riittävä ei-triviaalin välimuistitallennusstrategian arvioinnissa, joten esittelemme parempaa informaatiota sisältävät jalanjäljen pienentämisen sekä yhdistämistekijän. Näytämme, että yhteistyökäytäntö on avain erilaisten välimuistitallennusstrategian suunnitteluun liittyvien kompromissien tasapainotukseen ja tutkimme lisää sisällön erilaisten lohkomisjärjestelmien kautta aiheuttamaa vaikutusta performanssiin. Suunnittelun näkökulmasta näytämme ensin, kuinka erilaiset välimuistitallennuksen heuristiikat ja viisaan reitityksen järjestelmät parantavat merkittävästi välimuistitallennusperformanssia sekä helpottavat sisällön toimitusta. Sisällytämme sitten suunnitteluun hyvin määritellyn oikeudenmukaisuusmittarin ja johdamme uniikin optimaalin välimuistitallennusratkaisun Pareto-rintamalla neuvottelupelin kehyksissä. Lisäksi tutkimuksemme yhteistyökustannusten ja naapurustokoon funktionaalisesta suhteesta viittaa siihen, että yhteistyö on syytä rajoittaa pieneen naapurustoon sen kustannusten kasvaessa eksponentiaalisesti yleisessä verkkotopologiassa

Reducing Router Forwarding Table Size Using Aggregation and Caching

The fast growth of global routing table size has been causing concerns that the Forwarding Information Base (FIB) will not be able to fit in existing routers\u27 expensive line-card memory, and upgrades will lead to a higher cost for network operators and customers. FIB Aggregation, a technique that merges multiple FIB entries into one, is probably the most practical solution since it is a software solution local to a router, and does not require any changes to routing protocols or network operations. While previous work on FIB aggregation mostly focuses on reducing table size, this work focuses on algorithms that can update compressed FIBs quickly and incrementally. Quick updates are critical to routers because they have very limited time to process routing updates without impacting packet delivery performance. We have designed three algorithms: FIFA-S for the smallest table size, FIFA-T for the shortest running time, and FIFA-H for both small tables and short running time, and operators can use the one best suited to their needs. These algorithms significantly improve over existing work in terms of reducing routers\u27 computation overhead and limiting impact on the forwarding plane while maintaining a good compression ratio. Another potential solution is to install only the most popular FIB entries into the fast memory (e.g., an FIB cache), while storing the complete FIB in slow memory. In this paper, we propose an effective FIB caching scheme that achieves a considerably higher hit ratio than previous approaches while preventing the cache-hiding problem. Our experimental results using data traffic from a regional network show that with only 20K prefixes in the cache (5.36% of the actual FIB size), the hit ratio of our scheme is higher than 99.95%. Our scheme can also efficiently handle cache misses, cache replacement and routing updates

Modeling the Internet Routing Scalability: From Qualitative Description to Quantitative Evaluation

Abstract The Internet has been growing rapidly during the past few decades. It

Rethinking Routing and Peering in the era of Vertical Integration of Network Functions

Content providers typically control the digital content consumption services and are getting the most revenue by implementing an all-you-can-eat model via subscription or hyper-targeted advertisements. Revamping the existing Internet architecture and design, a vertical integration where a content provider and access ISP will act as unibody in a sugarcane form seems to be the recent trend. As this vertical integration trend is emerging in the ISP market, it is questionable if existing routing architecture will suffice in terms of sustainable economics, peering, and scalability. It is expected that the current routing will need careful modifications and smart innovations to ensure effective and reliable end-to-end packet delivery. This involves new feature developments for handling traffic with reduced latency to tackle routing scalability issues in a more secure way and to offer new services at cheaper costs. Considering the fact that prices of DRAM or TCAM in legacy routers are not necessarily decreasing at the desired pace, cloud computing can be a great solution to manage the increasing computation and memory complexity of routing functions in a centralized manner with optimized expenses. Focusing on the attributes associated with existing routing cost models and by exploring a hybrid approach to SDN, we also compare recent trends in cloud pricing (for both storage and service) to evaluate whether it would be economically beneficial to integrate cloud services with legacy routing for improved cost-efficiency. In terms of peering, using the US as a case study, we show the overlaps between access ISPs and content providers to explore the viability of a future in terms of peering between the new emerging content-dominated sugarcane ISPs and the healthiness of Internet economics. To this end, we introduce meta-peering, a term that encompasses automation efforts related to peering – from identifying a list of ISPs likely to peer, to injecting control-plane rules, to continuous monitoring and notifying any violation – one of the many outcroppings of vertical integration procedure which could be offered to the ISPs as a standalone service

Identifier-Based Discovery in Large-Scale Networks

The design of any network mechanism that requires collaboration among selfish agents could only benefit from accounting for the complex social and economic interactions and incentives of the agents using the design. This chapter presents a broad treatment of the main economic issues that arise in the context of identifier-based discovery on large scale networks, particularly on the Internet. An “identified” object (such as a node or service), referred to as a player, demands to be discoverable by the rest of the network on its “identifier”. A discovery scheme provides such a service to the players and incurs a cost for doing so. Providing such a service while accounting for the cost and making sure that the incentives of the players are aligned is the general economic problem that we address in this work. After introducing the identifier-based discovery problem, we present a taxonomy of discovery schemes and proposals based on their business model and we pose several questions that are becoming increasingly important as we proceed to design the inter-network of the future. An incentive model for distributed discovery in the context of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and path-vector protocols in general is then presented. We model BGP route distribution and computation using a game in which a BGP speaker advertises its prefix to its direct neighbors promising them a reward for further distributing the route deeper into the network. The neighbors do the same thing with their direct neighbors, and so on. The result of this cascaded route distribution is a globally advertised prefix and hence discoverability. We present initial results on the existence of equilibria in the game and we motivate our ongoing work

Naming and discovery in networks : architecture and economics

In less than three decades, the Internet was transformed from a research network available to the academic community into an international communication infrastructure. Despite its tremendous success, there is a growing consensus in the research community that the Internet has architectural limitations that need to be addressed in a effort to design a future Internet. Among the main technical limitations are the lack of mobility support, and the lack of security and trust. The Internet, and particularly TCP/IP, identifies endpoints using a location/routing identifier, the IP address. Coupling the endpoint identifier to the location identifier hinders mobility and poorly identifies the actual endpoint. On the other hand, the lack of security has been attributed to limitations in both the network and the endpoint. Authentication for example is one of the main concerns in the architecture and is hard to implement partly due to lack of identity support. The general problem that this dissertation is concerned with is that of designing a future Internet. Towards this end, we focus on two specific sub-problems. The first problem is the lack of a framework for thinking about architectures and their design implications. It was obvious after surveying the literature that the majority of the architectural work remains idiosyncratic and descriptions of network architectures are mostly idiomatic. This has led to the overloading of architectural terms, and to the emergence of a large body of network architecture proposals with no clear understanding of their cross similarities, compatibility points, their unique properties, and architectural performance and soundness. On the other hand, the second problem concerns the limitations of traditional naming and discovery schemes in terms of service differentiation and economic incentives. One of the recurring themes in the community is the need to separate an entity\u27s identifier from its locator to enhance mobility and security. Separation of identifier and locator is a widely accepted design principle for a future Internet. Separation however requires a process to translate from the identifier to the locator when discovering a network path to some identified entity. We refer to this process as identifier-based discovery, or simply discovery, and we recognize two limitations that are inherent in the design of traditional discovery schemes. The first limitation is the homogeneity of the service where all entities are assumed to have the same discovery performance requirements. The second limitation is the inherent incentive mismatch as it relates to sharing the cost of discovery. This dissertation addresses both subproblems, the architectural framework as well as the naming and discovery limitations