An Efficient Content Store-Based Forwarding Scheme for Internet of Things

One of the main advantages of information-centric networking (ICN) is that a requested piece of content can be retrieved from a content store (CS) at any intermediate node, instead of its original content producer. In existing ICN designs, nodes forward Interest packets mainly based on forwarding information base (FIB). FIB is constructed from name prefixes registered by content producers with a list of next hops to the name prefixes. The ICN forwarding engine uses those information to forward Interest packets towards corresponding content producers. CS information of a node is currently used only for checking the availability of cached content objects at the node and is not considered in the data plane of existing ICN forwarding mechanisms. This paper highlights the importance of CS information in an ICN forwarding mechanism and enables neighbor CS information in the data plane to improve the cache hit ratio and forwarding efficiency, especially for resource-constraint Internet of Things (IoT). We propose an efficient CS-based forwarding scheme for IoT. The proposed forwarding scheme exploits CS information of neighbors to find efficient routes to forward Interest packets toward nearby nodes with corresponding cached content. For that, we carefully design an efficient way for CS information sharing using counting bloom filter. We implement the proposed scheme and compare with state-of-the-art ICN forwarding schemes in IoT. Experimental results indicate that the proposed forwarding scheme achieves a significant improvement in terms of cache hit ratio, energy efficiency, content retrieval latency, and response rate.

On Sharing an FIB Table in Named Data Networking

As a new networking paradigm, Named Data Networking (NDN) technology focuses on contents, and content names are used as identifiers for forwarding and routing, as opposed to IP addresses in the current Internet. NDN routers forward packets by looking up a Forwarding Information Base (FIB), each entry of which has a name prefix and output faces. An FIB should have the information to forward Interest packets for any contents. Hence, the size of an FIB would be excessively large in NDN routers, and the traffic for building an FIB would be significant. In order to reduce the traffic associated with building an FIB table and memory requirement for storing an FIB table, this paper proposes a new efficient method which combines the routing of network connectivity and the building of a forwarding engine using Bloom filters. We propose to share the summary of an FIB using a Bloom filter rather than to advertise each name prefix. The forwarding engine of the proposed scheme is a combination of Bloom filters, and hence the memory requirement of the forwarding can be much smaller than the regular FIB. Simulation results using ndnSIM under real network topologies show that the proposed method can achieve nearly the same performance as the conventional link state algorithm with 6–8% of the traffic for distributing the connectivity information and 5–9% of the memory consumption.

Hierarchical Name-Based Mechanism for Push-Data Broadcast Control in Information-Centric Multihop Wireless Networks

By design, Named Data Networking (NDN) supports pull-based traffic, where content is retrieved only upon consumer request. However, some of the use cases (i.e., emergency situations) in the Internet of Things (IoT) requires push-based traffic, where a producer broadcasts the data based on the emergency situation without any consumer request. Therefore, it is necessary to modify the existing NDN forwarding engine when designing for an IoT scenario. Although solutions are provided to enable push-based traffic in IoT, the main solutions in the current literature lack data broadcast control design. Moreover, the existing solutions use an additional interest messages exchange, which creates extra overheads in the network, thereby resulting in higher delay and lower throughput. In this paper, therefore, we propose a name-based push-data broadcast control scheme for IoT systems, and consider two scenarios, i.e., smart buildings and vehicular networks. The proposed scheme consists of a robust content namespace design, device namespace design, and minor amendments to the data packet format and unsolicited data policy of the forwarding engine as well. The evaluation is carried out for both scenarios. Simulation experiments show that the proposed scheme outperforms the recent proposed schemes in terms of total number of data packets processed in the network, total energy consumption, and average delay in the network by varying the number of data packets per 2 s and varying vehicle speed.