Time-To-Live Based Caching Mechanism with Nonlinear Pricing for Information-centric Networks

A global content distribution is one of the important roles of the Internet. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a future internet architecture which attempts to redesign the Internet with a focus on content distribution. However, it has the potential performance degradation in the global content distribution. In this paper, we propose an ICN performance enhancing proxy (ICN-PEP) to mitigate this performance degradation. The key idea is to prefetch Data packets and to serve them to the consumer with the shortened round trip time. By utilizing ICN features, it is developed as offline and state-less proxy which has an advantage of scalability. We evaluate the performance of ICN-PEP in both simulation and real network and show that ICN-PEP improves the performance of global content distribution.

Caching is the key feature of Content Centric Networking (CCN) that allows the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to reduce network traffic crossing its network, and save bandwidth usage cost. On the other hand, it is also on benefit of the Content Providers (CPs) to cache the contents within the ISP network near the consumers. However, caching paid contents (the contents that only paying consumers can access), which are the main source of income for CP, in the ISP network complicates the CP's task of controlling content access and payment. Thus, ISP manages content placement inside its cache-enabled routers and serves content based on user demands, without any coordination with CP. There is no profit sharing mechanism between both ISP and CPs. Therefore, a payment mechanism between ISP and CPs that considers paid content caching and distribution inside the ISP network is needed. To address this challenge, we propose a new incentive mechanism for paid content caching that satisfies both ISP and CPs through the use of reverse auction. The ISP monetizes its cache storage through caching contents from multiple CPs and selling them to its customers. The reverse auction helps the ISP to get prices from multiple CPs, and to select the price that minimize its total payment. The simulation results show that our proposal satisfies all network players involved in in- network caching through increasing their utilities.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are both new evolving network architectures that are receiving a lot of attention from researchers. ICN is a Future Internet architecture which tries to transform the current Internet architecture from location- and host-centric to content-centric, where obtaining requested data is achieved by the contents’ names regardless of the location of the data. From another angle, SDN is considered a new Internet architecture that moves the control plane management from network devices to a centralized controller. The SDN controller enhances network robustness and improves its scalability, reliability, and flexibility. The integration of ICN and SDN results in massive benefits, where SDN enhances ICN networks’ manageability, controllability, and functionality, and ICN reshapes the SDN design to make it compatible with ICN features and to enhance ICN in terms of network caching, routing, mobility, and security.. In this review paper, a comprehensive survey of the issues and challenges of integrating ICN and SDN is presented. Firstly, ICN’s main characteristics are summarized, and a short comparison between different ICN architectures is completed. Then, the key details of SDN are highlighted. Moreover, the motivation and benefits of merging ICN with SDN are summarized and the state-of-the-art work on merging ICN and SDN is reviewed and classified from several aspects. Finally, several open research issues are highlighted.

The contributions of this paper are twofold. Firstly, we analyze the decision making problem of caching contents by the network players of Information Centric Networking (ICN) from a game theoretic perspective. We also mention a possible content distribution model for ICN. By our proposed game theory, different network players can find the optimality taking into consideration which benefits them with optimum revenue. Secondly, we present a solution for Live Streaming Media broadcast in ICN and analyze the economic part with a decision tree. We believe, our paper clearly shows the economic incentives for major network players which can stand as a motivation to achieve the faster accommodation of ICN architecture. Besides, we identify some standardization issue in ICN architecture and we emphasize on the need for a common standard for content routers (CR) so that as a node in the ICN, CR ensure scalable content delivery as well as its functionalities match with the Internet open standard philosophy.

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

Nowadays, Internet is mostly used to access content and users are also interested in content, instead of location. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has drawn substantial consideration over past few years because its appearance introduced a new potential Internet architecture (deploying extensive cache structure to distribute and deliver information). Though ICN has undoubtedly become a promising Future Internet architecture to solve current host-centric Internet problems, conventional ICN design still has its own drawbacks. These include caching, routing, etc., particularly mobility issue and energy-efficiency problem due to additional energy consumption for Content Routers’ caching capability. In order to address the energy flaw and enhance the mobility performance of ICNArchitecture, in this article, we have designed, evaluated and proposed a wireless Information Centric Networking (ICN) based access model within the context of Intelligent Transport System (ITS) for ICN standardization procedure. We take into consideration the fact that number of mobile devices increases rapidly day by day as well as the public transportation (e.g. train, bus, etc) becomes more popular nowadays. Besides, mobile users may ask for different content interests via Internet during the period of time when they are on public transport vehicle. We then propose a wireless communication topology in ICN for the ITS by utilizing the smart scheduling algorithm with proactive-caching based strategy to deal with possible and practical situations of commuters (mobile content users). In our scheme, the dedicated content provider proactively sends appropriate segments of requested content (based on chunk-level structure of content) to expected proximity Aggregation content nodes located at neighbor stations (future attachment points) on the moving path of public transportation vehicle. This working scheme substantially enhances the mobile user’s quality of experience and network performance in ICN. Moreover, the proposed ICN based system adapts the network nodes to their optimized network utilization values according to content popularity by conducting cross-layer optimization. This mechanism provides mobile users more reliable and effective Green Information and Communication Systems (ICS) when they travel with public transportation. Therefore, the proposal integrates Green networking into ICN by combining the benefits of innovated rate-adaptivity and proactive-caching based schemes for achieving highly scalable, reliable and energy-efficient network performance in future transportation Information-centric communication system with data-awareness. In addition, we identify that there are currently various ICN-based models and emphasize the need of an official ICN international standard for wireless communication in general and transportation system in particular. Following, by evaluating the proposal, we show that the proposed cross-layer wireless content access model in ICN for ITS is a promising and feasible contribution for the standardization process of ICN.

Information-Centric Networks (ICN) see the future architecture of the internet (radical change) by using an information-driven model and integrating from the design the essential functionalities to reach the best performances. Current approaches to ICN employ in-network caching to minimize the latency of information retrieval. Any content distribution over the network will be decided by the caching strategy adopted either along the delivery path or off-path caching. In ICN, caching is a key component essential for improving the quality of service by bringing content as close as possible to customers and reducing network traffic thereby minimizing bottlenecks and waiting time for customers. Software-Defined Networks is characterized by a total separation between the forwarding and control planes, easy network programmability, support for existing applications and architectures, and even for the deployment of new architectures with an open exchange. ICN and SDN are both very active axes proposing solutions for the future architecture of the Internet but with two different starting points. Their integration certainly triggers a promising hybrid solution but generates challenges such as in-network caching and data-centric security functionalities from an SDN perspective. In return, ICN is a radical solution that requires an organizer/supervisor to be deployed on the architectures of existing networks. Because of this, in this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the existing in-network caching mechanisms for CCN and SD-CCN architectures.

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new and promising network concept which is founded upon the idea that most users in the internet are interested in accessing digital objects, irrespectively of their locations. Digital objects in ICN have unique names that are used in order to route data content from the source node to the destination node. During the content delivery from sources to destinations, the data contents are cached to intermediate nodes in order to achieve efficient and reliable distribution of the data content among the network infrastructure (in-network caching). In this research project we focus on the efficiency of ICN for delivering Big Data with Persistent Identifiers. We proposed a Mapping Architecture for resolving PIDs to ICN names and we evaluate the efficiency of in-network caching when delivering Big Data objects. Our results showed that in-network caching can offer significant performance benefits when the cache size of the network elements that perform in-network caching is bigger than the Big Data object size.

Fog-based caching mechanism for IoT data in information centric network using prioritization

With the advancement in network infrastructure and the growth of IoT, more and more vehicular systems are getting connected. Architectures like Information Centric Networks (ICN) are being explored for vehicular communication to achieve robust content distribution in highly mobile, dynamic, and error prone domains. Consumer mobility is implicitly supported in ICN while producer mobility is an important challenge. In this paper, we design a mechanism to support producer mobility using the spatial locality of moving producers and reverse paths of data. Then, we model the consumer (requesting) application as a GI/M/c/N queue which is used to estimate system parameters like content delivery time distribution. We perform simulations using real world traces to evaluate the accuracy and working of our model.

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.

Content-based services are gaining tremendous popularity recently with the proliferation of a wide range of contents. Traditionally, hosting and distribution of these ubiquitous contents are accomplished using content distribution networks (CDNs). CDNs distribute contents in multiple hosting locations for load balancing, availability, and easy access. However, scalability and cost of CDNs are becoming major challenges due to the increase of content-based services. To combat these problems, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are being considered in combination with CDN to complement each other in a hybrid system. Research works and practical deployments have shown that hybrid CDN–P2P systems are feasible, inexpensive, and scalable. However, P2P-based content distribution systems are known to consume more system-wide energy than traditional CDNs. Hence, energy efficiency of such a hybrid system must be taken into consideration before wider implementation. In our study, we analyze the energy consumption of a hybrid CDN–P2P system in an IP-over-WDM network and show that, due to its hybrid nature, it is possible to exploit the P2P system to significantly reduce load on the CDN and at the same time constrain—and in some cases reduce—energy consumption. We propose energy-aware as well as energy-unaware content source selection mechanisms to help service providers achieve this win–win situation. Using simulations, we show that, for example, in case of a moderately popular content the server load can be reduced by 30%–40% while reducing the system-wide energy consumption by 10%–20% when compared with a traditional CDN.

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 mobile ad hoc networks and content routing: A survey

In-network content caching is a key feature of Information Centric Network (ICN), which facilitates efficient content distribution with reduced bandwidth consumption, less network congestion, and improved content retrieval latency. However, this ubiquitous caching of ICN is vulnerable to side-channel timing attack, where the adversary takes advantage of the response time difference between the cached and un-cached contents from the router, to detect if a privacy-sensitive object is cached, or even infer which user requested the object. To mitigate this type of privacy risk in ICN, we propose a differential defense mechanism against distributed timing attack in this paper. Specifically, we design an algorithm based on differential privacy to determine whether a cache-hit or cache-miss is returned for a certain request, which effectively hide the actual cache hit with differential privacy guarantee. Furthermore, a differential delay algorithm for artificial cache miss is implemented based on Laplace mechanism of differential privacy. Performance analysis and simulation results show that our scheme is more effective against distributed timing attack and incurs less impact on caching efficiency and delay performance compared with existing defense schemes for ICN.