PTF: Popularity-Topology-Freshness-based caching strategy for ICN-IoT networks

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promising candidate architecture for the future internet that leverages the content name instead of the source of the content (host address). ICN decouples the content from its original location and owner, and enables in-network caching at the network layer. Similarly, the inception of ioT has enabled futuristic applications and services in almost every walk of life. Due to the nature of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, traditional TCP/IP-based internet architecture faces challenges such as addressing, heterogeneity, availability, scalability, and resource constraints. Therefore, ICN can be a suitable choice to address these challenges in IoT applications. Among other features of ICN, the in-network caching feature increases the availability and efficiency of content-sharing in IoT networks. Therefore, it is essential to have efficient cache placement strategies in ICN to increase its utility. in this regard, in this article, we propose an ICN cache placement strategy at the edge network for IoT applications. More precisely, we design a distributed cache placement scheme that aims to push the popular content to the edge network and keep the relatively less-popular content at the core. We also propose a collaborative mechanism to fetch content from the nearest neighbor's content-store as well as propose a cache replacement policy based on the content popularity. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the proposed scheme and the obtained results show the efficiency and out-performance against similar strategies in the literature.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is overrunning different domains and applications, where the use of wireless sensors and mobile devices is indispensable in such a mobile environment. These heterogeneous devices may generate a tremendous amount of content. Information-Centric Network (ICN) paradigm has been proposed to meet today’s users and application requirements. The in-network caching is a fundamental feature supported by design in ICN that improves network performance by providing ubiquitous caching in the network layer. Since most IoT devices are resource-constrained with limitations in communication, processing, energy, and memory; the energy-efficiency is a prime concern in IoT deployment. Different factors may affect energy efficiency in ICN-based wireless IoT networks such as transport (communication), caching, and energy limitation. This research paper attempts to focus on the in-network caching in wireless IoT to maximize the energy-efficiency. We propose an Energy-aware caching placement scheme (EaCP) that aims to maximize the energy-saving by trading-off between content transmission energy and content caching energy. Compared to other strategies, the simulation results show significant improvements while ensuring low data replication and a high cache hit ratio.

International audience

<p>In recent years, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has emerged as a promising candidate for a future Internet architecture. While originally designed with the traditional Internet in mind, it has also been identified as a potential replacement for current Internet of Things (IoT) networking solutions. However, applications in the IoT face a number of unique challenges due to the constrained nature of the hardware. One of these challenges is that available memory is often extremely limited. This thesis aims to evaluate the feasibility of using ICN in-network caching on IoT devices in order to achieve efficient content delivery. It evaluates the performance of existing approaches on constrained hardware and explores how the technology can be improved and tailored towards that environment. Existing strategies are found to be lacking in key aspects, particularly the fact that the effects of network topology are often not considered when making caching decisions. It is shown that approaches based on network centrality are promising, but existing implementations are not suited for constrained hardware. Therefore, a lightweight in-network caching strategy called Approximate Betweenness Centrality (ABC) is proposed that takes the specific requirements of IoT into consideration and allows for efficient cache placement regardless of network topology. Then, a modular solution for load balancing through off-path caching is presented to address potential shortcomings of the centrality-based caching approach. It allows the network to make more efficient use of available caching resources without introducing additional overhead. Furthermore, solutions for ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) are discussed. The expanded role of caching strategies under such QoS constraints is explored and their performance is evaluated. This thesis shows that it is possible to design and deploy lightweight, low-overhead solutions on constrained hardware. Using a realistic deployment of physical IoT devices, it is demonstrated that these approaches can reach satisfactory levels of performance.</p>

Among the distinctive features of the Named Data Networking (NDN) paradigm, in-network caching plays a crucial role in improving data delivery performance. At the network edge, the benefits of in-network caching can be remarkable in terms of reduced network traffic and user-perceived access latency. Multiple strategies have been designed for caching static Internet contents in NDN routers, while less attention has been devoted to transient Internet of Things (IoT) data, which expire after a certain amount of time. In this work, we introduce a novel distributed and autonomous caching strategy where NDN nodes take decisions by considering the popularity of IoT data and their lifetime. The target is to cache the most popular data with the highest residual lifetime in order to maximize the cache hit ratio at the edge. Performance evaluation assessed with the ndnSIM network simulator shows that the proposed solution outperforms existing schemes available in the literature by guaranteeing, among others, the highest cache hit ratio and the shortest content retrieval time.

Distance-based dynamic caching and replacement strategy in NDN-IoT networks

A survey of Internet of Things communication using ICN: A use case perspective

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is the network of medical devices, hardware infrastructure, and software applications used to connect the healthcare information technology. Massive traffic growth and user expectations cause challenges in the current exhausting models of IoMT data. To reduce the IoMT traffic, Information Centric Network (ICN) is a suitable technique. ICN uses persistent naming multicast communication that reduces the response time. ICN in IoMT provides a promising feature to reduce the overhead due to the distribution of commonly accessed contents. Some parameters such as energy consumption, communication cost, etc., influence the performance of sensors in the IoMT network. Excessive and unbalanced energy consumption degrades the network performance and lifetime. This article presents a framework called Dynamic Cache Scheme (DCS) that implements energy-efficient cache scheduling in IoMT over ICN to reduce network traffic. The proposed framework establishes a balance between the multi-hop traffic and data item freshness. The technique improves the freshness of data; thus, updated data are provided to the end-users via the effective utilization of caching in IoMT. The proposed framework is tested on important parameters, i.e., cache-hit-ratio, stretch, and content retrieval latency. The results obtained are compared with the state-of-the-art models. Results’ analysis shows that the proposed framework outperforms the compared models in terms of cache-hit-ratio, stretch, and content retrieval latency by 59.42%, 32.66%, and 18.8%, respectively. In the future, it is intended to explore the applicability of DCS in more scenarios and optimize further.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) takes advances in content distribution, thanks to the in-network caches which naturally reduce the delay of upper-layer applications. Though attaining high dissemination efficiency, the in-network caching amplifies the challenges in the consistency of cached copies. Since ICN decouples data from the locations, it's hard for ICN to synchronize the caches efficiently once an update occurs, which could lead to potential issues of correctness and security. Herein, we propose a novel cache consistency mechanism based on role division, namely RD-CCM, to achieve strong consistency in ICN. RD-CCM divides network nodes into several roles and applies the Lease model among specific routers to maintain synchronization with high efficiency. We set up an adaptive parametric model to determine the Lease duration of RD-CCM, which balances the cost between storage and communication. Further, we optimize RD-CCM based on content popularity and Invertible Bloom Filter (IBF), diminishing the overhead of synchronization. We simulate RD-CCM on ndnSim to evaluate its performance, compared against Time- To-Live (TTL) and Polling-Every- Time (PET), which are employed in Named Data Networking (NDN). RD-CCM reduces the average hop counts by 32.5% compared against NDN-PET and reduces the cache staleness rate by 59.2% compared against NDN-TTL.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is receiving attention as an emerging network technology. Due to its attractive features, such as accessing content by its name, in-network caching, etc., ICN is expected to apply essentially to the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT applications typically collect a large amount of data widely distributed in various locations. For such usage, we proposed the architecture of Keyword-Based Content Retrieval (KBCR) in a previous paper, as an extension of ICN. In KBCR, a requester sends one request with some keywords, and can receive related content in one response. In this paper, we describe the implementation and performance evaluation of KBCR, and show the feasibility and efficiency of it. For implementation, we implemented KBCR protocol in our testbed system to confirm its functions and developed a demonstration application to show its effectiveness. For performance evaluation, we compared KBCR and NDN by queueing analysis using measured data on the prototype, and showed that KBCR provides better performance both in a requester load and the network delay/throughput.

The Internet is nowadays mainly used for streaming of multimedia content, something it was not built for originally. To guarantee user satisfaction, one of the key concepts of the Internet as we know it is bandwidth sharing. While this concept is necessary to provide stability in the network, several issues can arise with adaptive multimedia streaming, e.g., efficiency and stability. Considering Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and its network-inherent caching, those issues tend to become worse. Many researchers have proposed to use traffic shaping on the server to enable fair bandwidth sharing and stabilize clients. However, existing research does not consider content popularity and in-network caching. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we propose a cache-aware traffic shaping policy, in order to guarantee seamless playback of videos. Second, based on content popularity, we calculate an average video quality achieved by this traffic shaping policy for various cache sizes, to show the impact of popularity and caching for multimedia streaming in ICN.

With the rapid growth of internet traffic, the traditional host-to-host TCP/IP architecture is subject to many service limitations faced with content-oriented applications. Various novel network architectures have been proposed to solve these limitations, among which Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is one of the most prominent. ICN features the decoupling of content (service) from the physical devices storing (providing) it through location-independent naming, and offers inherent enhancement to network performance, such as multicast and in-network caching. ICN in-network caching has been extensively studied, and we believe that it may also be the main incentive for ISPs to deploy ICN. A CDN (content delivery network) is a typical content-oriented network paradigm that aims to provide the fast delivery of content. In this paper, we leverage the advantages of the in-network caching of ICN to enhance the content delivery efficiency of CDN by integrating ICN as a service. First, we present our design of a content delivery network enhanced with ICN, called IECDN. Additionally, we formulate a mathematical model to optimize the performance of our proposed design and conduct a series of evaluations. The results indicate that our proposed design provides significant performance gains while reducing bandwidth consumption and shows better resilience to traffic surge.

As devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) are typically battery-powered, energy efficiency is a major challenge for IoT networks. In this paper, we leverage the in-network caching of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) to propose a novel cooperative caching scheme, based on the IoT data lifetime and user request rate, to improve the energy efficiency of IoT networks. By caching IoT data at different nodes (such as content routers, base stations, etc.), IoT devices can stay in sleep mode for a larger portion of time and therefore reduce the overall energy consumption. With the help of an auto- configuration mechanism, the proposed IoT data Lifetime-based Cooperative Caching (LCC) scheme can dynamically adapt to the change of request rate. Extensive evaluations were performed and the simulation results show that LCC outperforms existing schemes in terms of total energy consumption reduction (up to 40%) and the reduction in the average number of hops traversed along the path (up to 20%), which is also directly related to the response time. Keywords- Internet of Things (IoT), Cooperative Caching, Information-Centric Network (ICN).

Current Internet architecture is becoming inadequate for new requirements of highly scalable and efficient distribution of contents. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is one of the alternatives for the Next Generation Internet (NGI), which focuses mainly on contents. In-network caching is one of the major attributes of ICN, which allows contents to be cached in any ICN node. Any user can access ICN contents from different distributed locations. This attribute maximizes the problem of unauthorized access to ICN contents. In this paper, we propose a Decentralized Access Control Protocol for ICN architectures (DACPI). In this protocol, fewer public messages are needed for access control enforcement between ICN subscribers and ICN nodes than the existing access control protocols. DACPI depends on ICN self-certifying naming scheme. We perform security analysis on DACPI for the following attacks: man-in-the-middle, forward security, replay attacks, integrity, and privacy violations. According to the security analysis, DACPI prevents unauthorized access to ICN contents with fewer messages passed.

Information centric networking (ICN) and software-defined networking (SDN) are two emerging networking paradigms that promise to solve different aspects of networking problems. ICN is a clean-slate design for accommodating the ever increasing growth of the Internet traffic by regarding content as the network primitive, adopting in-network caching, and name-based routing, while SDN focuses on agile and flexible network management by decoupling network control logic from data forwarding. ICN and SDN have gained significant research attention separately in the most of the previous work. However, the features of ICN have profound impacts on the design and operation of SDN, such as in-network caching and data-centric security. Conversely, SDN provides a powerful tool for experimenting and deploying ICN architectures and can greatly facilitate ICN functionality and management. In this paper, we point out the necessity of surveying the scattered works on integrating SDN and ICN (SD-ICN) for improving operational networks. Specifically, we analyze the points of SD-ICN strengths and opportunities, and discuss the SDN enablers for deploying ICN architectures. In addition, we review and classify the recent work on improving the network management by SD-ICN and discuss the potential security benefits of SD-ICN. Finally, a number of open issues and future trends are highlighted.