In recent years, software-defined networking (SDN), which performs centralized network management with software, has attracted much attention. Although packets are transmitted based on flow entries in SDN switches, the number of flow entries that the SDN switches can handle is limited. To overcome this difficulty, this paper proposes a flow-based routing method that performs flexible routing control with a small number of flow entries. The proposed method provides mixed integer programming. It assigns common paths to flows that can be aggregated at intermediate switches, while considering the utilization of network links. Because it is difficult for mixed integer programming to compute large-scale problems, the proposed method also provides a heuristic algorithm for them. Through numerical experiments, this paper shows that the proposed method efficiently reduces both the number of flow entries and the loads of congested links.

Today's enterprise, data-center, and internet-service-provider networks deploy different types of network devices, including switches, routers, and middleboxes such as network address translation and firewalls. These devices are vertically integrated monolithic systems. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) are promising technologies for dis-aggregating vertically integrated systems into components by using “softwarization”. Software-defined networking separates the control plane from the data plane of switch and router, while NFV decouples high-layer service functions (SFs) or Network Functions (NFs) implemented in the data plane of a middlebox and enables the innovation of policy implementation by using SF chaining. Even though there have been several survey studies in this area, this area is continuing to grow rapidly. In this paper, we present a recent survey of this area. In particular, we survey research activities in the areas of re-architecting middleboxes, state management, high-performance platforms, service chaining, resource management, and trouble shooting. Efforts in these research areas will enable the development of future virtual-network-function platforms and innovation in service management while maintaining acceptable capital and operational expenditure.

In order to support seamless mobility in the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Architecture we propose the Named-Node Network Architecture (3NA). 3NA introduces two independent namespaces to ICN, the 3N namespace used to uniquely identify nodes within a network and the Point of Attachment (PoA) namespace to identify a node's PoA to the network. The mappings between the two namespaces, along with all the necessary mechanisms to keep the mappings updated over time, are used when routing ICN packets to improve delay and the goodput when either the producer or the consumer are mobile. To support simultaneous producer and consumer mobility, we expand on the 3NA by adding a new Protocol Data Unit (PDU), the DU PDU. The DU PDU permits the encapsulation of ICN packets in a header that has source and destination name fields which belong to 3NA's 3N namespace. The new PDU permits seamless connectivity as long as 3NA's point of attachment signaling is strictly followed. We demonstrate the performance of the DU PDU against our previous defined communication methods and Named Data Networking's (NDN) Smart Flooding forwarding strategy using our open source nnnSIM module for the ns-3 framework. The new PDU outperforms all existing alternatives when the producer or both consumer and provider are mobile, obtaining overall lower mean network delay and higher median goodput.

This paper presents past and recent trends of optical networks and addresses the future directions. First, we describe path networks with the historical backgrounds and trends. path networks have advanced by using various multiplexing technologies. They include time-division multiplexing (TDM), asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). ATM was later succeeded to multi-protocol label switching (MPLS). Second, we present generalized MPLS technologies (GMPLS). In GMPLS, the label concept of MPLS is extended to other labels used in TDM, WDM, and fiber networks. GMPLS enables network operators to serve networks deployed by different technologies with a common protocol suite of GMPLS. Third, we describe multi-layer traffic engineering and a path computation element (PCE). Multi-layer traffic engineering designs and controls networks considering resource usages of more than one layer. This leads to use network resources more efficiently than the single-layer traffic engineering adopted independently for each layer. PCE is defined as a network element that computes paths, which are used for traffic engineering. Then, we address software-defined networks, which put the designed network functions into the programmable data plane by way of the management plane. We describe the evaluation from GMPLS to software defined networking (SDN) and transport SDN. Fifth, we describe the advanced devices and switches for optical networks. Finally, we address advances in networking technologies and future directions on optical networking.

A power packet dispatching system is proposed to realize the function of power on demand. This system distributes electrical power in quantized form, which is called power processing. This system has extensibility and flexibility. Here, we propose to use the power packet dispatching system as the next generation power distribution system in self-established and closed system such as robots, cars, and aircrafts. This paper introduces the concept and the required researches to take the power packet dispatching system in practical phase from the total viewpoints of devices, circuits, power electronics, system control, computer network, and bio-inspired power consumption.

For IP-based mobile networks, efficient mobility management is vital to provision seamless online service. IP address starvation and scalability issue constrain the wide deployment of existing mobility schemes, such as Mobile IP, Proxy Mobile IP, and their derivations. Most of the studies focus on the scenario of mobility among public networks. However, most of current networks, such as home networks, sensor networks, and enterprise networks, are deployed with private networks hard to apply mobility solutions. With the rapid development, Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers the opportunity of innovation to support mobility in private network schemes. In this paper, a novel mobility management scheme is presented to support mobile node moving from public network to private network in a seamless handover procedure. The centralized control manner and flexible flow management in SDN are utilized to provide network-based mobility support with better QoS guarantee. Benefiting from SDN/OpenFlow technology, complex handover process is simplified with fewer message exchanges. Furthermore, handover efficiency can be improved in terms of delay and overhead reduction, scalability, and security. Analytical analysis and implementation results showed a better performance than mobile IP in terms of latency and throughput variation.

We propose the node name routing (NNR) strategy for information-centric ad-hoc networks based on the named-node networking (3N). This strategy is especially valuable for use in disaster areas because, when the Internet is out of service during a disaster, our strategy can be used to set up a self-organizing network via cell phones or other terminal devices that have a sharing ability, and it does not rely on a base station (BS) or similar providers. Our proposed strategy can solve the multiple-name problem that has arisen in prior 3N proposals, as well as the dead loop problems in both 3N ad-hoc networks and TCP/IP ad-hoc networks. To evaluate the NNR strategy, it is compared with the optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR) and the dynamic source routing (DSR) strategy. Computer-based comprehensive simulations showed that our NNR proposal exhibits a better performance in this environment when all of the users are moving randomly. We further observed that with a growing number of users, our NNR protocol performs better in terms of packet delivery, routing cost, etc.

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.

Energy efficiency is an important requirement to forth-coming NDN (Named Data Networking) networks and caching inherent to NDN is a main driver of energy reduction in such networks. This paper addresses the research question “Does caching really reduce the energy consumption of the entire network?”. To answer the question, we precisely estimate how caching reduces energy consumption of forth-coming commercial NDN networks by carefully considering configurations of NDN routers. This estimation reveals that energy reduction due to caching depends on energy-proportionality of NDN routers.

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.

As a research project supported jointly by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan and the European Commission under its 7th Framework Program, the GreenICN Project has been in operation from 2013 to 2016. The GreenICN project focused on two typical application scenarios, one a disaster scenario and the other a video delivery scenario. The disaster scenario assumed a situation of limited resources, and the video delivery scenario assumed a situation of large-scale content delivery. In both situations, the project challenged to provide “green”, i.e. energy-efficient, content delivery mechanism. For this goal, we designed an energy consumption model to lay out energy reduction policies. For the achievement of the policies, we improved ICN architecture, for example a name-based publish/subscribe mechanism, an effective cache management policy,energy-efficient security scheme and a new energy API. This paper provides a summary of our achievements and descriptions of some outcome.

In this work, we propose general, practical and accurate models to analyze the performance of multi-cache systems, in which a cache forwards its miss stream (i.e., requests which have not found the target item) to other caches. We extend a miss stream modeling technique originally known as Melazzi's approximation, which provides a simple but accurate approximate analysis for caches with cascade configurations. We consider several practical replication strategies, which have been commonly adopted in the context of ICN, taking into account the effects of temporal locality. Also, we capture the existing state correlations between neighboring caches by exploiting the cache eviction time. Our proposed models to handle traffic patterns allow us to go beyond the standard Poisson approximation under Independent Reference Model. Our results, validated against simulations, provide interesting insights into the performance of multi-cache systems with different replication strategies.

This paper proposes an NDN-based message delivery protocol over a cellular network in disasters. Collaborative communication among cellular devices is integrated into the protocol so that power consumed by battery-operated base stations (BSs) is reduced when a blackout occurs. A key idea is to reduce consumed radio resources by making cellular devices of which radio propagation quality are better forward messages of neighboring devices. The radio resource reduction contributes to reducing power consumed by a battery-operated BS. We empirically and analytically evaluate how the proposed message delivery protocol reduces the power consumption of a BS assuming a densely populated shelter.

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.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) technology has recently been attracting substantial interest in the research community as one of the most promising future Internet architectures. The Named Data Networking (NDN) approach, which is one of the most recent instantiations of the ICN approach, would be a good choice for multimedia services, because NDN utilizes in-network storage embedded in NDN routers by caching recently or frequently requested contents. It is important to determine which data to cache at which NDN routers in order to achieve high performance, by considering not only the popularity of contents but also the inter-chunk popularity of a content item. This paper presents a chunk-block-based incremental caching scheme that considers both content and inter-chunk popularity. Our proposed scheme employs an incremental cache populating mechanism, which utilizes not only core-side but also edge-side NDN routers according to the request rate of the content item. Through simulations, we show that the proposed scheme achieves less delay, reduced redundant network traffic, and a higher cache hit ratio than legacy schemes.

Information-centric networking (ICN) has been investigated as a new communication model that is optimal for data registration and retrieval. A promising application of ICN is mobile machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in which data are registered by M2M terminals, such as vehicles, and retrieved by other M2M terminals. One of the most difficult challenges with ICN is achieving data mobility in which the data are registered by moving terminals and the location of the data changes constantly. To gain access to moving data, the data retrieval messages must access the routing information, which results in a high volume of message transaction loads of high-tier nodes such as the name resolution nodes. We previously proposed a scheme called data-centric network (DCN), which mitigates this problem by allocating multiple intermediate nodes that act as route aggregation points and by establishing optimized routes. In this paper, we compare the transaction load of DCN with those of conventional ICN schemes using theoretical evaluation based on probability calculation. We also compare the amount of route information and transaction loads using a simulator against binary tree and ISP backbone topologies. From these evaluations, we clarify the characteristics of each ICN scheme in different terminal distribution and communication patterns and show that DCN reduces the transaction loads of high-tier nodes when the terminals are communicating locally.

To efficiently utilize storage resources, the in-network caching system of Information-Centric Networking has to deal with the popularity of huge content chunks which could cause large memory consumption. This paper presents a Popularity Monitoring based Gain-aware caching scheme, called PMG, which is an integrated design of cache placement and popularity monitoring. In PMG, by taking into account both the chunk popularity and the consumption saving of single cache hit, the cache placement process is transformed into a weighted popularity comparison, while the chunks with high cache gain are placed on the node closer to the content consumer. A Bloom Filter based sliding window algorithm, which is self-adaptive to the dynamic request rate, is proposed to capture the chunks with higher caching gain by Inter-Reference Gap (IRG) detection. Analysis shows that PMG can drastically reduce the memory consumption of popularity monitoring, and the simulation results confirm that our scheme can achieve popularity based cache placement and get better performance in terms of bandwidth saving and cache hit ratio when content popularity changes dynamically.

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.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) treats contents as first class citizens and adopts name-based routing for content distribution and retrieval. Content names rather than IP addresses are directly used for routing. However, due to the location-independent naming and the huge namespace, name-based routing faces scalability and efficiency issues including large routing tables and high path stretches. This paper proposes a universal Scalable Name-based Geometric Routing scheme (SNGR), which is a careful synthesis of geometric routing and name resolution. To provide scalable and efficient underlying routing, a universal geometric routing framework (GRF) is proposed. Any geometric routing scheme can be used directly for name resolution based on GRF. To implement an overlay name resolution system, SNGR utilizes a bi-level grouping design. With this design, a resolution node that is close to the consumer can always be found. Our theoretical analyses guarantee the performance of SNGR, and experiments show that SNGR outperforms similar routing schemes in terms of node state, path stretch, and reliability.

Named Data Networking (NDN) has emerged as an alternative to traditional IP-based networking for the achievement of Information-Centric Networking (ICN). Currently, most NDN is deployed over IP networks, but such an overlay deployment increases the transport network overhead due to the use of dual network control planes (NDN routing and IP routing). Software-Defined Networking (SDN) can be used to mitigate the network overhead by forwarding NDN packets without the use of IP routing. However, to deploy NDN over SDN, a variable NDN content name needs to be mapped to a fixed-size match field in an OpenFlow switch flow table. For efficient support of such a mapping task, we propose a new architecture that uses dual name for content: content name and Name Tag. The Name Tag is derived from the corresponding content name and is a legitimate IPv6 address. By using the proposed Name Tag, the SDN with an NDN control application can transport an IPv6 packet that encapsulates an NDN packet for an NDN name-based routing. We emulate the proposed architecture using Mininet and verify that it is feasible.