Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an innovative technology that provides low-loss, low-latency, high-throughput, and high-reliability communications for diversified and advanced services and applications. In this article, we present a technical survey of ICN functionalities such as in-network caching, routing, transport, and security mechanisms, as well as recent research findings. We focus on CCNx, which is a prominent ICN protocol whose message types are defined by the Internet Research Task Force. To facilitate the development of functional code and encourage application deployment, we introduce an open-source software platform called Cefore that facilitates CCNx-based communications. Cefore consists of networking components such as packet forwarding and in-network caching daemons, and it provides APIs and a Python wrapper program that enables users to easily develop CCNx applications for on Cefore. We introduce a Mininet-based Cefore emulator and lightweight Docker containers for running CCNx experiments on Cefore. In addition to exploring ICN features and implementations, we also consider promising research directions for further innovation.

In this paper, we propose a packet loss detection mechanism called Interest ACKnowledgement (ACK). Interest ACK provides information on the history of successful Interest packet receptions at a repository (i.e., content provider); this information is conveyed to the corresponding entity (i.e., content consumer) via the header of Data packets. Interest ACKs enable the entity to quickly and accurately detect Interest and Data packet losses in the network. We conduct simulations to investigate the effectiveness of Interest ACKs under several scenarios. Our results show that Interest ACKs are effective for improving the adaptability and stability of CCN with window-based flow control and that packet losses at the repository can be reduced by 10%-20%. Moreover, by extending Interest ACK, we propose a lossy link detection mechanism called LLD-IA (Lossy Link Detection with Interest ACKs), which is a mechanism for an entity to estimate the link where the packet was discarded in a network. Also, we show that LLD-IA can effectively detect links where packets were discarded under moderate packet loss ratios through simulation.

In content oriented networks (CON), routers in a network are generally equipped with local cache storages and store incoming contents temporarily. Efficient utilization of total cache storage in networks is one of the most important technical issues in CON, as it can reduce content server load, content download latency and network traffic. Performance of networked cache is reported to strongly depend on both cache decision and content request routing. In this paper, we evaluate several combinations of these two strategies. Especially for routing, we take up off-path cache routing, Breadcrumbs, as one of the content request routing proposals. Our performance evaluation results show that off-path cache routing, Breadcrumbs, suffers low performance with cache decisions which generally has high performance with shortest path routing (SPR), and obtains excellent performance with TERC (Transparent En-Route Cache) which is well-known to have low performance with widely used SPR. Our detailed evaluation results in two network environments, emerging CONs and conventional IP, show these insights hold in both of these two network environments.

Information-centric networking (ICN) has gained attention from network research communities due to its capability of efficient content dissemination. In-network caching function in ICN plays an important role to achieve the design motivation. However, many researchers on in-network caching due to its ability to efficiently disseminate content. The in-network caching function in ICN plays an important role in realizing the design goals. However, many in-network caching researchers have focused on where to cache rather than how to cache: the former is known as content deployment in the network and the latter is known as cache replacement in an ICN router. Although the cache replacement has been intensively researched in the context of web-caching and content delivery network previously, networks, the conventional approaches cannot be directly applied to ICN due to the fine granularity of chunks in ICN, which eventually changes the access patterns. In this paper, we argue that ICN requires a novel cache replacement algorithm to fulfill the requirements in the design of a high performance ICN router. Then, we propose a novel cache replacement algorithm to satisfy the requirements named Compact CLOCK with Adaptive Replacement (Compact CAR), which can reduce the consumption of cache memory to one-tenth compared to conventional approaches. In this paper, we argue that ICN requires a novel cache replacement algorithm to fulfill the requirements set for high performance ICN routers. Our solution, Compact CLOCK with Adaptive Replacement (Compact CAR), is a novel cache replacement algorithm that satisfies the requirements. The evaluation result shows that the consumption of cache memory required to achieve a desired performance can be reduced by 90% compared to conventional approaches such as FIFO and CLOCK.

In this paper, we use the MCA (Multi-Cache Approximation) algorithm to numerically determine cache hit probability in a multi-cache network. We then analytically obtain performance metrics for Content-Centric networking (CCN). Our analytical model contains multiple routers, multiple repositories (e.g., storage servers), and multiple entities (e.g., clients). We obtain three performance metrics: content delivery delay (i.e., the average time required for an entity to retrieve a content through a neighboring router), throughput (i.e., number of contents delivered from an entity per unit of time), and availability (i.e., probability that an entity can successfully retrieve a content from a network). Through several numerical examples, we investigate how network topology affects the performance of CCN. A notable finding is that content caching becomes more beneficial in terms of content delivery time and availability (resp., throughput) as distance between the entity and the requesting repository narrows (resp., widens).

Information-centric networking (ICN) has received increasing attention from all over the world. The novel aspects of ICN (e.g., the combination of caching, multicasting, and aggregating requests) is based on names that act as addresses for content. The communication with name has the potential to cope with the growing and complicating Internet technology, for example, Internet of Things, cloud computing, and a smart society. To realize ICN, router hardware must implement an innovative cache replacement algorithm that offers performance far superior to a simple policy-based algorithm while still operating with feasible computational and memory overhead. However, most previous studies on cache replacement policies in ICN have proposed policies that are too blunt to achieve significant performance improvement, such as first-in first-out (popularly, FIFO) and random policies, or impractical policies in a resource-restricted environment, such as least recently used (LRU). Thus, we propose CLOCK-Pro Using Switching Hash-tables (CUSH) as the suitable policy for network caching. CUSH can identify and keep popular content worth caching in a network environment. CUSH also employs CLOCK and hash-tables, which are low-overhead data structure, to satisfy the cost requirement. We numerically evaluate our proposed approach, showing that our proposal can achieve cache hits against the traffic traces that simple conventional algorithms hardly cause any hits.

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.

We introduce a novel cache replacement policy to improve the entire network performance of video delivery over content-centric networking (CCN). In the case of the CCN structure, we argue that: 1) for video multiplexing scenario, general cache strategies that ignore the intrinsic linear time characteristic of video requests are unable to make better use of the cache resources, and 2) it is inadequate to simply extend the existing research conclusions of file-oriented popularity to chunk-by-chunk popularity, which are widely used in CCN. Unlike previous works in this field, the proposed policy in this study, named two-level popularity-oriented time-to-hold cache replacement policy (TLP-TTH), is designed on the basis of the following principles. Firstly, the proposed cache replacement strategy is customized for video delivery by carefully considering the essential auto-correlated request feature of video chunks within a video file. Furthermore, the popularity in video delivery is subdivided into two levels, namely chunk-level access probability and file-level popularity, in order to efficiently utilize cache resources. We evaluated the proposed policy in both a hierarchical topology and a real network based hybrid topology, and took viewers departure into consideration as well. The results validate that for video delivery over CCN, TLP-TTH policy improves the network performance from several aspects. In particular, we observed that the proposed policy not only increases the cache hit ratio at the edge of the network but the cache utilization at the intermediate routers is also improved markedly. Further, with respect to the video popularity variation scenario, the cache hit ratio of TLP-TTH policy responds sensitively to maintain efficient cache utilization.

Content-centric networking (CCN) is an emerging networking architecture that is being actively investigated in both the research and industrial communities. In the latest version of CCN, a large number of interests have to be issued when large content is retrieved. Since CCN routers have to search several tables for each incoming interest, this could cause a serious problem of router workload. In order to solve this problem, this paper introduces a novel strategy of “grouping” multiple interests with common information and “packing” them to a special interest called the list interest. Our list interest is designed to co-operate with the manifest of CCN as its dual. This paper demonstrates that by skipping and terminating several search steps using the common information in the list interest, the router can search its tables for the list interest-based request with dramatically smaller complexity than the case of the standard interest-based request. Furthermore, we also consider the deployment of list interests and design a novel TCP-like congestion control method for list interests to employ them just like standard interests.

In this paper, we give a formalization of the behavior of the Content-Centric Networking (CCN) protocol with parameterizing content managements. CCN is a communications architecture that is based on the names of contents, rather than on addresses. In the protocol used in CCN, each node sends packets to the nodes that are connected to it, which communicate with further nodes that are connected to them. This kind of behaviors prevents formalizing the CCN protocol as end-to-end communications. In our previous work, we formalized the CCN protocol using the proof assistant Coq. However, in this model, each node in the network can store any number of contents. The storage for each node is usually limited and the node may drop some of the contents due to its filled storage. The model proposed in this paper permits a node to have its own content management method, and still keeps the temporal properties that are also valid in the previous model. To demonstrate difference between these models, we give a specification that is valid in the previous model but invalid in the proposed model, called orthogonality. Since it is generally invalid in CCN, the proposed model is more precise than the previous one.

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) has an in-network caching mechanism, which can reduce the traffic volume along the route to the destination host. This traffic volume reduction on the transit link can decrease inter-ISP transit cost. However, the memory space for caching in CCN routers is small relative to content volume. In addition, any initial access to the content requested by a user must use the transit link, even when a nearby CCN router outside the route has the cached content. In this paper, we propose a method of cooperative cache sharing among CCN routers in multiple ISPs. It aims to attain a further reduction in the inter-ISP transit cost by improving the cache hit ratio. In the proposed method, the CCN routers share the memory space for caching of non-overlapping cache content. We evaluate the proposed method by simulation experiments using the IP-level network topology of actual ISP, and show that the inter-ISP transit traffic can be reduced by up to 28% compared with normal caching behavior of CCN.

Content-centric networking (CCN) is an innovative network architecture that is being considered as a successor to the Internet. In recent years, CCN has received increasing attention from all over the world because its novel technologies (e.g., caching, multicast, aggregating requests) and communication based on names that act as addresses for content have the potential to resolve various problems facing the Internet. To implement these technologies, however, requires routers with performance far superior to that offered by today's Internet routers. Although many researchers have proposed various router components, such as caching and name lookup mechanisms, there are few router-level designs incorporating all the necessary components. The design and evaluation of a complete router is the primary contribution of this paper. We provide a concrete hardware design for a router model that uses three basic tables — forwarding information base (FIB), pending interest table (PIT), and content store (CS) — and incorporates two entities that we propose. One of these entities is the name lookup entity, which looks up a name address within a few cycles from content-addressable memory by use of a Bloom filter; the other is the interest count entity, which counts interest packets that require certain content and selects content worth caching. Our contributions are (1) presenting a proper algorithm for looking up and matching name addresses in CCN communication, (2) proposing a method to process CCN packets in a way that achieves high throughput and very low latency, and (3) demonstrating feasible performance and cost on the basis of a concrete hardware design using distributed content-addressable memory.

Content caching networks like Information-Centric Networking (ICN) are beneficial to reduce the network traffic by storing content data on routers near to users. In ICN, it becomes an important issue to manage system resources, such as storage and network bandwidth, which are influenced by cache characteristics of each cache node. Meanwhile, cache aging techniques based on Time-To-Live (TTL) of content facilitate analyzing cache characteristics and can realize appropriate resource management by setting efficient TTLs. However, it is difficult to search for the efficient TTLs in a distributed cache system connected by multiple cache nodes. Therefore, we propose an adaptive control mechanism of the TTL value of content in distributed cache systems by using predictive models which can estimate the impact of the TTL values on network resources and cache performance. Furthermore, we show the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.

This paper presents an optimal cooperative routing protocol (OCRP) aiming to improve the in-network cache utilization of the Content-Centric Networking (CCN). The objective of OCRP is to selectively aggregate the multiple flows of interest messages onto the same path in order to improve the cache utilization while mitigating the cache contention of the Content Stores (CSs) of CCN routers on the routing path. The proposed routing protocol consists of three processes: (1) Prefix Popularity Observation; (2) Prefix Group (Un)Subscription; and (3) Forwarding Information Base (FIB) Reconstruction. Prefix Popularity Observation observes the popularly cited prefixes to activate a prefix group (un)subscription function, which lets the Designated Router (DR) know which requester router wants to either join or leave a prefix group. Prefix Group (Un)Subscription lets the DR know which requester router is demanding to join or leave which prefix group. FIB Reconstruction reconstructs the FIB entries of the CCN routers involved in the newly computed optimal cooperative path of all prefix groups. The optimal routing path is obtained by binary linear optimization under a flow conservation constraint, cache contention mitigating constraint, and path length constraint. Two metrics of server load and round-trip hop distance are used to measure the performance of the proposed routing protocol. Simulation results from various network scenarios and various settings show advantages over the shortest path routing and our previously proposed cooperative routing schemes.

Content-centric networking (CCN) is one of candidates being spotlighted as the technologies of the future Internet to solve the problems of the current Internet. Since DoS/DDoS attack is the most serious threat to the current Internet, this letter introduces the possibility of DoS/DDoS attack on CCN for the first time. And we introduce an attack method using fake-request packets and propose countermeasures in order to detect and/or react to CCN DoS/DDoS attack, and then analyze the result of our proposal.