In recent years, much work has been devoted to developing protocols and architectures for supporting the growing trend of data-oriented services. One drawback of many of these proposals is the need to upgrade or replace all the routers in order for the new systems to work. Among the few systems that allow for gradual deployment is the recently-proposed Breadcrumbs technique for distributed coordination among caches in a cache network. Breadcrumbs uses information collected locally at each cache during past downloads to support in-network guiding of current requests to desired content. Specifically, during content download a series of short-term pointers, called breadcrumbs, is set up along the download path. Future requests for this content are initially routed towards the server which holds (a copy of) this content. However, if this route leads the request to a Breadcrumbs-supporting router, this router re-directs the request in the direction of the latest downloaded, using the aforementioned pointers. Thus, content requests are initially forwarded by a location ID (e.g., IP address), but encountering a breadcrumb entry can cause a shift over to content-based routing. This property enables the Breadcrumbs system to be deployed gradually, since it only enhances the existing location-based routing mechanism (i.e. IP-based routing). In this paper we evaluate the performance of a network where Breadcrumbs is only partially deployed. Our simulation results show Breadcrumbs performs poorly when sparsely deployed. However, if an overlay of Breadcrumbs-supporting routers is set-up, system performance is greatly improved. We believe that the reduced load on servers achieved with even a limited deployment of Breadcrumbs-supporting routers, combined with the flexibility of being able to deploy the system gradually, should motivate further investigation and eventual deployment of Breadcrumbs. In the paper, we also evaluate more coarse level than router level, i.e. ISP-level Breadcrumbs deployment issues. Our evaluation results show that Higher-layer first deployment approach obtains great improvement caused by Breadcrumbs redirections because of traffic aggregation in higher layer ISP.

In-network guidance to off-path cache, Breadcrumbs, has been proposed for cache network. It guides content requests to off-path cached contents by using the latest content download direction pointer, breadcrumbs. In Breadcrumbs, breadcrumb pointer is overwritten when a new content download of the corresponding content passes through a router. There is a possibility that slightly old guidance information for popular contents might lead to better cached content than the latest one. In this paper, we propose a new in-network guidance, Multiple-Breadcrumbs, which holds old breadcrumbs even with the latest breadcrumb pointer generated with a new content download. We focus on its content search capability and propose Throughput Sensitive selection that selects the content source giving the best estimated throughput. Our performance evaluation gives interesting results that our proposed Multiple Breadcrumbs with Throughput Sensitive selection improves not only throughput for popular contents but also for unpopular contents.

In large-scale data centers, two types of network are implemented: local area networks (LANs) and storage area networks (SANs). To achieve simple network management, integration of these two networks by Ethernet technology is of great interest. A SAN requires a significantly low frame loss rate. To integrate LANs and SANs, a multi-hop Ethernet configuration is generally used, and congestion may occur in traffic hot spots. Therefore, layer-2 congestion control that prevents frame loss in multi-hop Ethernet, Quantized Congestion Notification (QCN), is now discussed in IEEE 802.1Qau. In this paper, we evaluate QCN's throughput performance and reveal a technical problem with fairness among active flows. We also propose Adaptive BC_LIMIT for QCN where BC_LIMIT is adaptively decided according to current transmission rate of flows. Simulation results show that our proposed method significantly improves fairness among QCN flows.

Application-level multicast (ALM) is a feasible alternative to IP multicast. In ALM, multicast related features, such as group membership management, multicast routing and packet replication, are implemented at end-hosts instead of routers. A multicast distribution tree is constructed in the application layer, so all nodes in this tree are end-hosts. Packet transmission between end-hosts uses conventional IP unicast service. Therefore, all end-hosts can enjoy multicast communications without IP multicast service. However, ALM has a serious problem that the multicast distribution tree is intrinsically fragile and an end-host failure causes tree partitions. In this paper, to deal with this problem, we propose a new tree construction protocol which makes outdegrees of intermediate nodes be balanced. The degree-balanced distribution tree can reduce the average number of nodes decoupled by tree partitions. To investigate performance of our protocol, it is compared with an existing ALM protocol. Our simulation results show that our protocol outperforms the existing protocol from the viewpoints of robustness, loss probability and receiver-perceived delay.

In multicast congestion control, the receiver of the worst congestion level is selected as the representative and transmission rate of the sender is adjusted to TCP throughput of the representative. This approach has high scalability and TCP friendliness. However, when this approach is applied in wireless communications, wireless-caused packet loss will cause to frequent change of the representative. This is because degradation of wireless channel quality causes bursty packet loss at a corresponding receiver. Fading, one of main reasons of wireless channel degradation, is expected to be recovered after short time period, which leads to frequent change of the representative. This frequent change of representative makes the sender adjust its transmission rate to the tentative worst receiver, which brings severe performance degradation to wireless multicast. We call this technical problem, the wireless-caused representative selection fluctuation problem. Wireless-caused representative selection fluctuation problem is one of scalability problems in the wireless multicast, because this problem remarkably happens for large scale multicast. We propose two possible solutions for this problem, an end-to-end approach and a network support approach. Performance evaluation in various situation show that an end-to-end approach is sensitive for its inferring error but a network support approach shows good performance improvement.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) originally innovated for efficient data distribution, is currently discussed to be applied to edge computing environment. In this paper, we focus on a more flexible context, in-network computing, which is enabled by ICN architecture. In ICN-based in-network computing, a function chaining (routing) method for chaining multiple functions located at different routers widely distributed in the network is required. Our proposal is a twofold approach, On-demand Routing for Responsive Route (OR3) and Route Records (RR). OR3 efficiently chains data and multiple functions compared with an existing routing method. RR reactively stores routing information to reduce communication/computing overhead. In this paper, we conducted a mathematical analytics in order to verify the correctness of the proposed routing algorithm. Moreover, we investigate applicabilities of OR3/RR to an edge computing context in the future Beyond 5G/6G era, in which rich computing resources are provided by mobile nodes thanks to the cutting-edge mobile device technologies. In the mobile environments, the optimum from viewpoint of “routing” is largely different from the stable wired environment. We address this challenging issue and newly propose protocol enhancements for OR3 by considering node mobility. Evaluation results reveal that mobility-enhanced OR3 can discover stable paths for function chaining to enable more reliable ICN-based in-network computing under the highly-dynamic network environment.

Large-scale content transfer, especially video transfer, is now a dominant traffic component in the Internet. Originally, content transfer had a content-oriented feature, i.e., “Users do not care where content is retrieved. Users only take care of what content they obtain.” Conventional traffic engineering (TE) aims to obtain optimal routes for traffic between ingress and egress router pairs, i.e., TE has focused on a location-oriented approach that takes care of where to connect. With increased demand for content-oriented features for content traffic, TE needs to focus on content-oriented routing design. In this study, we therefore propose a novel approach to content-oriented TE, called content aware routing (CAR). In CAR, routes are designed for content and egress router pairs, i.e., content traffic toward a receiver-side router. Content demand can be flexibly distributed to multiple servers (i.e., repositories) providing the same content, meaning that content can be obtained from anywhere. CAR solves the optimization problem of minimizing maximum link utilization. If there are multiple optimal solutions, CAR selects a solution in which resource usage is minimized. Using numerical examples formulated by the linear programming problem, we evaluated CAR by comparing it with combinations of conventional content delivery networks and TE, i.e., location-oriented designs. Our numerical results showed that CAR improved maximum link utilization by up to 15%, with only a 5% increase of network resource usage.

This paper presents a performance evaluation of NAK-based reliable multicast communication protocols operating in an environment where end-to-end delay are heterogeneous. In the case of heterogeneous delay, performance of a timer-based retransmission control scheme may become worse. We show that a counter-based retransmission control scheme works well in the case of heterogeneous transmission delay. We also compare two NAK-based protocols and show that a NAK-multicasting protocol outperforms a NAK-unicasting protocol from the viewpoint of scalability even when delays are heterogeneous.

Communication infrastructures under the influence of the disaster strike, e.g., earthquake, will be partitioned due to the significant damage of network components such as base stations. The communication model of the Internet bases on a location-oriented ID, i.e., IP address, and depends on the DNS (Domain Name System) for name resolution. Therefore such damage remarkably deprives the reachability to the information. To achieve robustness of information retrieval in disaster situation, we try to apply CCN/NDN (Content-Centric Networking/Named-Data Networking) to information networks fragmented by the disaster strike. However, existing retransmission control in CCN is not suitable for the fragmented networks with intermittent links due to the timer-based end-to-end behavior. Also, the intermittent links cause a problem for cache behavior. In order to resolve these technical issues, we propose a new packet forwarding scheme with the dynamic routing protocol which resolves retransmission control problem and cache control scheme suitable for the fragmented networks. Our simulation results reveal that the proposed caching scheme can stably store popular contents into cache storages of routers and improve cache hit ratio. And they also reveal that our proposed packet forwarding method significantly improves traffic load, energy consumption and content retrieval delay in fragmented networks.

In this paper, we first evaluate Breadcrumbs in wireless multi-hop networks and reveal that they brings throughput improvement of not only popular content but also less popular content. Breadcrumbs can distribute popular content traffic towards edges of a wireless network, which enables low-popularity content to be downloaded from the gateway node. We also propose a new caching decision, called receiver caching. In receiver caching, only the receiver node caches the transmitted content. Our simulation results show that receiver caching prevents frequent replacement of cached content, which reduces invalid Breadcrumbs trails to be remained. And they also show that receiver caching significantly improves the total throughput performance of Breadcrumbs.

In this paper, we propose a new network organizing method for packet radio networks, a layered self-organizing method. In the layered self-organizing network, whole service area is divided into multiple sub-areas and one base station is settled in each sub-area. Communication links are settled in shorter time than the conventional self-organizing method. We evaluate the network organizing performance of the method by using simulations.

In reliable multicast communications, retransmission control plays an important role from the viewpoint of scalability. Previous works show that the implosion of control packets, e.g. ACKs or NAKs, degrades the total performance of reliable multicast communications. Local recovery which enables receivers receiving a packet successfully to initiate recovering a lost packet may have the possibility to solve this scalability problem. This paper presents the performance evaluation of local recovery caused by grouping receiving nodes in reliable multicast communication. There seems to be many features dominating the performance of local recovery, the number of nodes in a group, the shared loss occurring simultaneously at multiple receivers and so on. When the number of receivers in a group increases, the geographical expansion of a group will degrade the delay performance of the receivers. In a configuration where most nodes in a local-recovery group suffer from shared loss, the failure of local recovery degrades the total performance. Our simulation results under a hierarchical network topology like the real Internet show that a local-recovery group configuration with two-adjacent MANs grouping performs well.

In research community of content distribution, a new communication paradigm of rendezvous-based abstraction which easily enables location-free content-oriented services, attracts great attention. ID/Locator separation architecture is originally proposed for resolving increase of routing table size in the current Internet but it has possibility of supporting this abstraction because host ID is clearly separated from its location. This feature of ID/Locator separation means an end host can be identified by ID independent of its network layer protocol. So, ID/Locator separation architecture enables communication with end host(s) operating different network-layer protocol, which might increase candidate paths between host pairs and improve content distribution path. In this paper, we evaluate this improvement of shortest path brought by inter-layer 3 networking. In inter-layer 3 networking, a shared node connecting different network layer plane plays an important role. We evaluate shortest path improvement with various shared node locations and show that strategic assignment of shared nodes brings large improvement. When multiple layer 3 networks are available for users, shortest path might be improved even only with multi-homing (without inter-layer 3 networking). We also evaluate shortest path improvement brought by multi-homing and inter-layer 3 networking for incremental deployment scenario of multi-homing. Our simulation results show that inter-layer 3 networking brings great improvement even with small number of users deploying multi-homing while only multi-homing itself brings small improvement.

Quantized congestion notification (QCN), discussed in IEEE 802.1Qau, is one of the most promising Layer 2 congestion control methods for data center networks. Because data center networks have fundamentally symmetric structures and links are designed to have high link utilization, data center flows often pass through multiple bottleneck links. QCN reduces its transmission rate in a probabilistic manner with each congestion notification feedback reception, which might cause excessive regulation of the transmission rate in a multiple-bottleneck case because each bottleneck causes congestion feedbacks. We have already proposed QCN with bottleneck selection (QCN/BS) for multicast communications in data center networks. Although QCN/BS was originally proposed for multicast communications, it can also be applied to unicast communications with multiple bottleneck points. QCN/BS calculates the congestion level for each switch based on feedback from the switch and adjusts its transmission rate to the worst congestion level. In this paper, we preliminarily evaluate QCN/BS in unicast communications with multiple tandem bottleneck points. Our preliminary evaluation reveals that QCN/BS can resolve the excessive rate regulation problem of QCN but has new fairness problems for long-hop flows. To resolve this, we propose a new algorithm that integrates QCN/BS and our already proposed Adaptive BC_LIMIT. In Adaptive BC_LIMIT, the opportunities for rate increase are almost the same for all flows even if their transmission rates differ, enabling an accelerated convergence of fair rate allocation among flows sharing a bottleneck link. The integrated algorithm is the first congestion control mechanism that takes into account unicast flows passing through multiple tandem bottleneck points based on QCN. Furthermore, it does not require any modifications of switches used in QCN. Our simulation results show that our proposed integration of QCN/BS and Adaptive BC_LIMIT significantly mitigates the fairness problem for unicast communications with multiple bottleneck points in data center networks.

Multicast communications have been expected as an effective way to disseminate information to potentially large number of receivers. IP multicast is a well- known multicast protocol for the Internet. However, IP multicast has several technical problems to be resolved until it is widely deployed in the Internet. These includes service-model of multicast group, reliable transport protocol, congestion control and security. A lot of researches trying to resolve these technical problems make multicast communications a hot research area in these couple of decades. This paper overviews the present style of IP multicast and clearlify technical issues of the present multicast communications. The paper also surveys important approaches to these problems and discuss about future directions of multicast communications.

In content distribution networks (CDNs), the content routing which directs user requests to an adequate server from the viewpoint of improvement of latency for obtaining contents is one of the most important technical issues. Several information, e.g. server load or network delay, can be used for content routing. Network support, e.g. active network, enables a router to select an adequate server by using these information. In the paper, we investigate a server selection policy of a network support approach from the viewpoint of which information to be used for effective server selection. We propose a server selection policy using RTT information measured at a router. Simulation results show that our proposed server selection policy in content routing selects a good server under both conditions where server latency and network delay is a dominant element of user response time. Furthermore, we also investigate about location of routers with network support bringing good performance for our proposed scheme.

TCP/IP is a key technology in the next generation mobile communication networks. A significant amount of wireless traffic will be carried in the Internet, and wireless connections will have to share network resources with wired connections. However, in a wireless network environment, TCP suffers significant throughput degradation due to the lossy characteristic of a wireless link. Therefore, to design the next generation mobile networks, it is necessary to know how much the wireless connection suffers from the degradation in comparison to the wired connection. In this paper, we discuss the fairness issue between TCP connections over wireless and wired links, and theoretically analyze the fairness of throughput between TCP over wireless link with ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest)-based link layer error recovery and TCP over error-free wired link. We validate our analysis by comparing the numerical results obtained from the analysis with the results obtained from computer simulation. The numerical results show that the fairness is sensitive to network propagation delay and variation rapidity of wireless link characteristic. We also obtain the theoretical lower bound of fairness.

In the mobile Internet, a handover brings significant performance degradation of TCP due to bursty packet losses during handover processing. In this paper, we propose a new bandwidth control for improving the TCP performance. In the proposed system, when a mobile node changes its accessing base station, an intermediate router suppresses an available bandwidth to the corresponding TCP flow. Because suppressing the bandwidth results in reducing mis-forwarded packets to the old base station, the bursty packet losses can be avoided. In the hierarchical mobile network structure, which is recently developed in order to realize micro-mobility protocol, all packets transferred to mobile nodes are converged to several gateways such as mobility anchor points (MAP) in hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6). Therefore, the proposed system is suited to the hierarchical structure because it can be easily implemented at such gateways. Computer simulation results show that the proposed system can improve the TCP performance degradation especially in a situation where handovers frequently occur.

DQRUMA (Distributed-Queueing Request Update Multiple Access) protocol has been proposed as an access protocol for the wireless ATM Local Area Networks. DQRUMA protocol is useful to transmit fixed-length packets (e. g. ATM cells). However, it cannot be applied to multimedia environment because it does not include any access control policy for multimedia traffic. In the paper, we propose a slot assignment scheme of DQRUMA protocol in wireless ATM LAN which supports integrated multimedia traffic with different service requirements. In this scheme we can allocate network resources according to the service requirements of each medium because the base station assigns Transmit-Permission flexibly according to the features of each medium.