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.

A city-level digital twin is a critical enabling technology to construct a smart city that helps improve citizens' living conditions and quality of life. Currently, research and development regarding the digital replica city are pursued worldwide. However, many research projects only focus on creating the 3D city model. A mechanism to involve key players, such as data providers, service providers, and application developers, is essential for constructing the digital replica city and producing various city applications. Based on this motivation, the authors of this paper are pursuing a research project, namely Decentralized Digital Twin EcoSystem (D2EcoSys), to create an ecosystem to advance (and self-grow) the digital replica city regarding time and space directions, city services, and values. This paper introduces an overview of the D2EcoSys project: vision, problem statement, and approach. In addition, the paper discusses the recent research results regarding networking technologies and demonstrates an early testbed built in the Kashiwa-no-ha smart city.

In this paper, a wireless communication network that uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the sky to transmit information between ground users is considered. We highlight a delay-tolerant network, where information is relayed in a store-and-forward fashion by establishing two types of intermittent communication links: between a UAV and a user (UAV-to-user) and between UAVs (UAV-to-UAV). Thus, a flight algorithm that controls the movement of the UAVs is crucial in achieving rapid information transmission. Our study proposes new flight algorithms that simultaneously consider the two types of communication links. In UAV-to-UAV links, the direct information transmission between two UAVs and the indirect transmission through other UAVs are considered separately. The movement of the UAVs is controlled by solving an optimization problem at certain time intervals, with a variable consideration ratio of the two types of links. In addition, we investigate not only the case where all UAVs move cooperatively but also the case where each UAV moves autonomously. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms are effective. Moreover, they indicate the existence of an optimal consideration ratio of the two types of communication and demonstrate that our approach enables the control of frequencies of establishing the communication links. We conclude that increasing the frequency of indirect communication between UAVs improves network performance.

In this paper, we propose a new rate-based congestion control method for Named Data Networking (NDN) using additive increase multiplicative decrease (AIMD) and explicit rate notification. In the proposed method, routers notify a corresponding consumer of bottleneck bandwidth by use of Data packets, in a relatively long interval. In addition, routers monitor outgoing faces using the leaky bucket mechanism. When congestion is detected, the routers report this to corresponding consumers using negative-acknowledgment (NACK) packets. A consumer sets its Interest sending rate to the reported rate when a new value is reported. In addition, the consumer adjusts the sending rate to be around the reported rate based on the AIMD mechanism at Data/NACK packet reception. Computer simulations show that the proposed method achieves a high throughput performance and max-min fairness thanks to the effective congestion avoidance.

Industrial networks need to provide reliable communication services, usually in a redundant transmission (RT) manner. In the past few years, several device-redundancy-based, layer 2 solutions have been proposed. However, with the evolution of industrial networks to the Industrial Internet, these methods can no longer work properly in the non-redundancy, layer 3 environments. In this paper, an SDN-based reliable communication framework is proposed for the Industrial Internet. It can provide reliable communication guarantees for mission-critical applications while servicing non-critical applications in a best-effort transmission manner. Specifically, it first implements an RT-based reliable communication method using the Industrial Internet's link-redundancy feature. Next, it presents a redundant synchronization mechanism to prevent end systems from receiving duplicate data. Finally, to maximize the number of critical flows in it (an NP-hard problem), two ILP-based routing & scheduling algorithms are also put forward. These two algorithms are optimal (Scheduling with Unconstrained Routing, SUR) and suboptimal (Scheduling with Minimum length Routing, SMR). Numerous simulations are conducted to evaluate its effectiveness. The results show that it can provide reliable, duplicate-free services to end systems. Its reliable communication method performs better than the conventional best-effort transmission method in terms of packet delivery success ratio in layer 3 networks. In addition, its scheduling algorithm, SMR, performs well on the experimental topologies (with average quality of 93% when compared to SUR), and the time overhead is acceptable.

This paper considers an emergency communication system controlling multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the sky over a large-scale disaster-affected area. This system is based on delay-tolerant networking, and information from ground users is relayed by the UAVs through wireless transmission and the movement of UAVs in a store-and-forward manner. Each UAV moves autonomously according to a predetermined flight method, which uses the positions of other UAVs through communication. In this paper, we propose a new method for UAV flight considering the non-uniformity of user distributions. The method is based on the Voronoi cell using the predicted locations of other UAVs. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method through computer simulations with a non-uniform user distribution generated by a general cluster point process. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

OpenFlow is a widely adopted implementation of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture. Since conventional network monitoring systems are unable to cope with OpenFlow networks, researchers have developed various monitoring systems tailored for OpenFlow networks. However, these existing systems either rely on a specific controller framework or an API, both of which are not part of the OpenFlow specification, and thus limit their applicability. This article proposes a transparent and low-overhead monitoring system for OpenFlow networks, referred to as Opimon. Opimon monitors the network topology, switch statistics, and flow tables in an OpenFlow network and visualizes the result through a web interface in real-time. Opimon monitors a network by interposing a proxy between the controller and switches and intercepting every OpenFlow message exchanged. This design allows Opimon to be compatible with any OpenFlow switch or controller. We tested the functionalities of Opimon on a virtual network built using Mininet and a large-scale international OpenFlow testbed (PRAGMA-ENT). Furthermore, we measured the performance overhead incurred by Opimon and demonstrated that the overhead in terms of latency and throughput was less than 3% and 5%, respectively.

This work proposes NFD.P4, a cache implementation scheme in Named Data Networking (NDN), to solve the problem of insufficient cache space of prgrammable switch and realize the practical application of NDN. We transplant the cache function of NDN.P4 to the NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD) cache server, which replace the memory space of programmable switch.

To safeguard critical services and assets in a distributed environment, collaborative intrusion detection systems (CIDSs) are usually adopted to share necessary data and information among various nodes, and enhance the detection capability. For simplifying the network management, software defined networking (SDN) is an emerging platform that decouples the controller plane from the data plane. Intuitively, SDN can help lighten the management complexity in CIDSs, and a CIDS can protect the security of SDN. In practical implementation, trust management is an important approach to help identify insider attacks (or malicious nodes) in CIDSs, but the challenge is how to ensure the data integrity when evaluating the reputation of a node. Motivated by the recent development of blockchain technology, in this work, we design BlockCSDN — a framework of blockchain-based collaborative intrusion detection in SDN, and take the challenge-based CIDS as a study. The experimental results under both external and internal attacks indicate that using blockchain technology can benefit the robustness and security of CIDSs and SDN.

TCP/IP, the foundation of the current Internet, assumes a sufficiently low packet loss rate for links in communication path. On the other hand, for communication services such as mobile and wireless communications, communication link tends to be disruptive. In this paper, we propose Layer-5 temporally-spliced path protocol (L5-TSPP), which provides disruption-tolerance in the L5 temporally-spliced path (L5-TSP), as one of the communication paths provided by Layer-5 (L5-paths). We design and implement an API for using L5-paths (L5 API). The L5 API is designed and implemented to support not only POSIX systems but also non-POSIX systems. L5 API and L5-TSPP are implemented in the user space in Go language. The measurement results show that L5-TSP achieves lower and more stable connection establishment time and better end-to-end throughput in the presence of disruption than conventional communication paths.

Recently, information centric network (ICN) has attracted attention because cached content delivery from router's cache storage improves quality of service (QoS) by reducing redundant traffic. Then, adaptive video streaming is applied to ICN to improve client's quality of experience (QoE). However, in the previous approaches for the cache control, the router implicitly caches the content requested by a user for the other users who may request the same content subsequently. As a result, these approaches are not able to use the cache effectively to improve client's QoE because the cached contents are not always requested by the other users. In addition, since the previous cache control does not consider network congestion state, the adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithm works incorrectly and causes congestion, and then QoE degrades due to unnecessary congestion. In this paper, we propose an explicit cache placement notification for congestion-aware adaptive video streaming over ICN (CASwECPN) to mitigate congestion. CASwECPN encourages explicit feedback according to the congestion detection in the router on the communication path. While congestion is detected, the router caches the requested content to its cache storage and explicitly notifies the client that the requested content is cached (explicit cache placement and notification) to mitigate congestion quickly. Then the client retrieve the explicitly cached content in the router detecting congestion according to the general procedures of ICN. The simulation experiments show that CASwECPN improves both QoS and client's QoE in adaptive video streaming that adjusts the bitrate adaptively every video segment download. As a result, CASwECPN effectively uses router's cache storage as compared to the conventional cache control policies.

A global content delivery plays an important role in the current Internet. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a future internet architecture which attempts to redesign the Internet with a focus on the content delivery. However, it has the potential performance degradation in the global content delivery. 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 shorter round trip time. By utilizing ICN features, it can be developed as an offline and state-less proxy which has an advantage of scalability. We evaluate the performance of ICN-PEP in both simulation and experiment on global testbed and show that ICN-PEP improves the performance of global content delivery.

Information-centric networking (ICN) provides an alternative to the traditional end-to-end communication model of the current Internet architecture by focusing on information dissemination and information retrieval. Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the candidates that implements the idea of ICN on a practical level. Implementing NDN in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will bring all the benefits of NDN to WSNs, making them more efficient. By applying the NDN paradigm directly to wireless multi-hop ad-hoc networks, various drawbacks are observed, such as packet flooding due to the broadcast nature of the wireless channel. To cope with these problems, in this paper, we propose an Interest called the accumulation-based forwarding scheme, as well as a novel content store architecture to increase its efficiency in terms of storing and searching data packets. We have performed extensive simulations using the ndnSIM simulator. Experimental results showed that the proposed scheme performs better when compared to another scheme in terms of the total number of Interests, the content store search time, and the network lifetime.

The need of telecommunications operators to reduce Capital and Operational Expenditures in networks which traffic is continuously growing has made them search for new alternatives to simplify and automate their procedures. Because of the different transport network segments and multiple layers, the deployment of end-to-end services is a complex task. Also, because of the multiple vendor existence, the control plane has not been fully homogenized, making end-to-end connectivity services a manual and slow process, and the allocation of computing resources across the entire network a difficult task. The new massive capacity requested by Data Centers and the new 5G connectivity services will urge for a better solution to orchestrate the transport network and the distributed computing resources. This article presents and demonstrates a Network Slicing solution together with an end-to-end service orchestration for transport networks. The Network Slicing solution permits the co-existence of virtual networks (one per service) over the same physical network to ensure the specific service requirements. The network orchestrator allows automated end-to-end services across multi-layer multi-domain network segments making use of the standard Transport API (TAPI) data model for both l0 and l2 layers. Both solutions will allow to keep up with beyond 5G services and the higher and faster demand of network and computing resources.

Recently, adaptive streaming over information centric network (ICN) has attracted attention. In adaptive streaming over ICN, the bitrate adaptation of the client often overestimates a bitrate for available bandwidth due to congestion because the client implicitly estimates congestion status from the content download procedures of ICN. As a result, streaming overestimated bitrate results in QoE degradation of clients such as cause of a stall time and frequent variation of the bitrate. In this paper, we propose a congestion-aware adaptive streaming over ICN combined with the explicit congestion notification (CAAS with ECN) to avoid QoE degradation. CAAS with ECN encourages explicit feedback of congestion detected in the router on the communication path, and introduces the upper band of the selectable bitrate (bitrate-cap) based on explicit feedback from the router to the bitrate adaptation of the clients. We evaluate the effectiveness of CAAS with ECN for client's QoE degradation due to congestion and behavior on the QoS metrics based on throughput. The simulation experiments show that the bitrate adjustment for all the clients improves QoE degradation and QoE fairness due to effective congestion avoidance.

Large-scale disasters can lead to a severe damage or destruction of optical transport networks including the data-plane (D-plane) and control and management-plane (C/M-plane). In addition to D-plane recovery, quick recovery of the C/M-plane network in modern software-defined networking (SDN)-based fiber optical networks is essential not only for emergency control of surviving optical network resources, but also for quick collection of information related to network damage/survivability to enable the optimal recovery plan to be decided as early as possible. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, low energy consumption, and low-cost IoT devices have been more common. Corresponding long-distance networking technologies such as low-power wide-area (LPWA) and LPWA-based mesh (LPWA-mesh) networks promise wide coverage sensing and environment data collection capabilities. We are motivated to take an infrastructure-less IoT approach to provide long-distance, low-power and inexpensive wireless connectivity and create an emergency C/M-plane network for early disaster recovery. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of fiber networks C/M-plane recovery using an IoT-based extremely narrow-band, and lossy links system (FRENLL). For the first time, we demonstrate a field-trial experiment of a long-latency/loss tolerable SDN C/M-plane that can take advantage of widely available IoT resources and easy-to-create wireless mesh networks to enable the timely recovery of the C/M-plane after disaster.

Connecting a large number of servers with high bandwidth links is one of the most crucial and challenging tasks that the Data Center Network (DCN) must fulfill. DCN faces a lot of difficulties like the effective exploitation of DC components that, if highlighted, can aid in constructing high performance, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective DCN. In this paper, we investigate the server-centric structure. We observe that current DCs use servers that mostly come with dual ports. Effective exploitation of the ports of interest for building the topology structure can help in realizing the potentialities of reducing expensive topology. Our new network topology, named “Parallel Cubes” (PCube), is a duplicate defined structure that utilizes the ports in the servers and mini-switches to form a highly effective, scalable, and efficient network structure. P-Cube provides high performance in network latency and throughput and fault tolerance. Additionally, P-Cube is highly scalable to encompass hundreds of thousands of servers with a low stable diameter and high bisection width. We design a routing algorithm for P-Cube network that utilizes the P-Cube structure to strike a balance among the numerous links in the network. Finally, numerical results are provided to show that our proposed topology is a promising structure as it outperforms other topologies and it is superior to Fat-tree, BCube and DCell by approximately 24%, 16%, 8% respectively in terms of network throughput and latency. Moreover, P-Cube extremely outperforms Fat-tree, and BCube structures in terms of total cost, complexity of cabling and power consumption.

In the coming smart-home era, more and more household electrical appliances are generating more and more sensor data and transmitting them over the home networks, which are often connected to Internet through Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) for desirable authentication and accounting. However, according to our knowledge, high-speed commercial home PPPoE router is still absent for a home network environment. In this paper, we first introduce and evaluate our programmable platform FLARE-DPDK for ease of programming network functions. Then we introduce our effort to build a compact 10Gbps software FLARE PPPoE router on a commercial mini-PC. In our implementation, the control plane is implemented with Linux PPPoE software for authentication-like signaling control. The data plane is implemented over FLARE-DPDK platform, where we get packets from physical network interfaces directly bypassing Linux kernel and distribute packets to multiple CPU cores for data processing in parallel. We verify our software PPPoE router in both lab and production network environment. The experimental results show that our FLARE software PPPoE router can achieve much higher throughput than a commercial PPPoE router tested in a production environment.

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a time-aware shaper, which is a traffic shaper specifically designed for IEEE 802.1Qbv-compliant time-sensitive networks. The proposed design adopts a software-based approach rather than using a dedicated custom logic chip such as an ASIC or FPGA. In particular, the proposed approach includes a run-time scheduler and a network interface card (NIC) that supports a time-based transmission scheme (i.e., launch-time feature). The run-time scheduler prefetches information (i.e., gate control entry) ahead of time from a given gate control list. With the prefetched information, the scheduler determines a launch time for each frame, and the NIC controls the time at which the transmission of each frame is started in a highly punctual manner. Evaluation results show that the proposed shaper triggers transmission of multiple time-sensitive streams at their intended timings in accordance with a given gate control list, even in the presence of high-bandwidth background traffic. Furthermore, we compare the timing accuracy of frame transmission with and without use of the launch-time feature of the NIC. Results indicate that the proposed shaper significantly reduces jitter of time-sensitive streams (to less than 0.1 µs) unlike a baseline implementation that does not use the launch-time feature.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables flexible deployment and innovation of new networking applications by decoupling and abstracting the control and data planes. It has radically changed the concept and way of building and managing networked systems, and reduced the barriers to entry for new players in the service markets. It is considered to be a promising solution providing the scale and versatility necessary for IoT. However, SDN may also face many challenges, i.e., the centralized control plane would be a single point of failure. With the advent of blockchain technology, blockchain-based SDN has become an emerging architecture for securing a distributed network environment. Motivated by this, in this work, we summarize the generic framework of blockchain-based SDN, discuss security challenges and relevant solutions, and provide insights on the future development in this field.