This paper argues that a layered approach is more suitable for Information Centric Networking (ICN) than a narrow-waist approach and proposes an ICN mechanism called ZINK. In ZINK, a location-independent content name is resolved to a list of node IDs of content servers in the application layer and a node ID is mapped to a node locator in the network layer, which results in scalable locator-based routing. An ID/Locator split approach in the network layer can efficiently support client/serever mobility. Efficient content transfer is achieved by using sophisticated functions in the transport layer such as multipath transfer for bandwidth aggregation or fault tolerance. Existing well-tuned congestion control in the transport layer achieves fairness not only among ICN flows but also among ICN flows and other flows. A proof-of concept prototype of ZINK is implemented on an IPv6 stack. Evaluation results show that the time for content finding is practical, efficient content transfer is possible by using multipath transfer, and the mobility support mechanism is scalable as shown in a nationwide experiment environment in Japan.

Because of the popularity of rich content, such as video files, the amount of traffic on the Internet continues to grow every year. Not only is the overall traffic increasing, but also the temporal fluctuations in traffic are increasing, and differences in the amounts of traffic between peak and off-peak periods are becoming very large. Consequently, efficient use of link bandwidth is becoming more challenging. In this paper, we propose a new system for content distribution: storage aware routing (SAR). With SAR, routers having large storage capacities can exploit those links that are underutilized. Our performance evaluations show that SAR can smooth the fluctuations in link utilization.

Due to the recent network service market trends, network infrastructure providers must make their network infrastructures tolerant of network service complexity and swift at providing new network services. To achieve this, we first make a design decision for the single domain network infrastructure in which we use network virtualization and separate the network service control and management from the network infrastructure and leave the resource connectivity control and management in the network infrastructure so that the infrastructure can maintain simplicity and the network service can become complex and be quickly provided. Along with the decision, we construct an architecture of the network infrastructure and a network management model. The management model defines a slice as being determined by abstracted resource requirements and restructures the roles and planes from the viewpoint of network infrastructure usability so that network service requesters can manage network resources freely and swiftly in an abstract manner within the authorities the network infrastructure operator provides. We give the details of our design and implementation for a network virtualization management system along with the model. We deployed and evaluated our designed and implemented management system on the Japan national R&E testbed (JGN-X) to confirm the feasibility of our management system design and discuss room for improvement in terms of response time and scalability towards practical use. We also investigated certain cases of sophisticated network functions to confirm that the infrastructure can accept these functions without having to be modified.

The Internet was designed for academic use more than 40 years ago. After having been used commercially, many unpredictable requirements have emerged, including mobility, security and content distribution. In addition, the Internet has become so ossified that fulfilling new requirements is difficult. Instead of developing ad-hoc solutions, re-designing clean-slate Internet architectures has become a key research challenge in networking communities. This survey paper addresses key research issues and then introduces ongoing research projects from Japan, the United States and the European Union.

For flexibility in supporting mobility and multihoming in edge networks and scalability of the backbone routing system, future Internet is expected to be based on the concept of ID/locator split. Heterogeneity Inclusion and Mobility Adaptation through Locator ID Separation (HIMALIS) has been designed as a generic future network architecture based on ID/locator split concept. It can natively support mobility, multihoming, scalable backbone routing and heterogeneous protocols in the network layer of the new generation network or future Internet. However, HIMALIS still lacks security functions to protect itself from various attacks during the procedures of storing, updating, and retrieving of ID/locator mappings, such as impersonation attacks. Therefore, in this paper, we address the issues of security functions design and implementation for the HIMALIS architecture. We present an integrated security scheme consisting of mapping registration and retrieval security, network access security, communication session security, and mobility security. Through the proposed scheme, the hostname to ID and locator mapping records can be securely stored and updated in two types of name registries, domain name registry and host name registry. Meanwhile, the mapping records retrieved securely from these registries are utilized for securing the network access process, communication sessions, and mobility management functions. The proposed scheme provides comprehensive protection of both control and data packets as well as the network infrastructure through an effective combination of asymmetric and symmetric cryptographic functions.

This paper presents recent progress made in the development of an optical packet and circuit integrated network. From the viewpoint of end users, this is a single network that provides both high-speed, inexpensive services and deterministic-delay, low-data-loss services according to the users' usage scenario. From the viewpoint of network service providers, this network provides large switching capacity with low energy requirements, high flexibility, and efficient resource utilization with a simple control mechanism. The network we describe here will contribute to diversification of services, enhanced functional flexibility, and efficient energy consumption, which are included in the twelve design goals of Future Networks announced by ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union - Telecommunication Standardization Sector). We examine the waveband-based network architecture of the optical packet and circuit integrated network. Use of multi-wavelength optical packet increases the switch throughput while minimizing energy consumption. A rank accounting method provides a solution to the problem of inter-domain signaling for end-to-end lightpath establishment. Moving boundary control for packet and circuit services makes for efficient resource utilization. We also describe related advanced technologies such as waveband switching, elastic lightpaths, automatic locator numbering assignment, and biologically-inspired control of optical integrated network.

The explosive growth of Internet usage has caused problems for the current Internet in terms of traffic congestion within networks and performance degradation of end-to-end flows. Therefore, a reconsideration of the current Internet has begun and is being actively discussed worldwide with the goals of enabling efficient share of limited network resources (i.e., the link bandwidth) and improved performance. To directly address the inefficiency of TCP's congestion mitigation solely on the end-to-end basis, in this paper we propose an adaptive split connection scheme on advanced relay nodes; this scheme dynamically splits end-to-end TCP connections on the basis of congestion status in output links. Through simulation evaluations, we examine the effectiveness and potential of the proposed scheme.

The use of IP addresses as host IDs and locators in the present day Internet protocols imposes constraints on designing efficient solutions for mobility, multihoming, renumbering, and security. To eliminate the constraints, different approaches of introducing ID/locator split into future network architectures have been discussed recently. HIMALIS is such an architecture, which uses distinct sets of values for identifiers and locators and allows the network layer to change locators without requiring the upper layers to change identifiers. One of the major challenges of HIMALIS is the design and implementation of a distributed ID-to-locator mapping database system to efficiently store, update and provide the up-to-date mapping data to the network elements. For this purpose, this paper discusses the application of the Domain Trusted Entity (DTE) infrastructure to the HIMALIS architecture. It provides a unified manner to get locators from high level identifiers (names) with enhanced security, privacy, and trust, while maintaining all capabilities and full compatibility with the previous DNR, HNR, and IDR infrastructures found in HIMALIS.

In this paper, we show the recent progress of photonic network technologies for the new generation network (NWGN). The NWGN is based on new design concepts that look beyond the next generation network (NGN) and the Internet. The NWGN will maintain the sustainability of our prosperous civilization and help resolve various social issues and problems by the use of information and communication technologies. In order to realize the NWGN, many novel technologies in the physical layer are required, in addition to technologies in the network control layer. Examples of cutting-edge physical layer technologies required to realize the NWGN include a terabit/s/port or greater ultra-wideband optical packet switching system, a modulation-format-free optical packet switching (OPS) node, a hybrid optoelectronic packet switching node, a packet-based reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) system, an optical packet and circuit integrated node system, and optical buffering technologies.

Limitations are found in the recent Internet because a lot of functions and protocols are patched to the original suite of layered protocols without considering global optimization. This reveals that end-to-end argument in the original Internet was neither sufficient for the current societal network and nor for a sustainable network of the future. In this position paper, we present design guidelines for a future network, which we call the New Generation Network, which provides the inclusion of diverse human requirements, reliable connection between the real-world and virtual network space, and promotion of social potentiality for human emergence. The guidelines consist of the crystal synthesis, the reality connection, and the sustainable & evolutional guidelines.

IP-- is proposed as an Internet Protocol suitable for optical packet networking. As optical routers require much faster control than electric ones and lack of optical buffers other than those by fiber delay lines requires fixed time control, Internet Protocols must be at least as simple as IPv4 and much simpler than IPv6. IP-- also addresses issues of IP address space exhaustion and IP routing table explosion.

We have been considering the architecture of the future carrier network which will be the successor to Next Generation Network (NGN). Our assessments have clarified the key problems that will arise in the era when NGN has matured. Based on our studies, we define the vision and the architecture that can solve these problems. This paper provides a snapshot of our work in order to contribute to research on the New Generation Network and beyond.

The current Internet is not capable of meeting the future communication requirements of society, i.e., reliable connectivity in a ubiquitous networking environment. The shortcomings of the Internet are due to the lack of support for mobility, multihoming, security and heterogeneous network layer protocols in the original design. Therefore, to provide ubiquitous networking facilities to the society for future innovation, we have to redesign the future Internet, which we call the New Generation Network. In this paper, we present the Heterogeneity Inclusion and Mobility Adaptation through Locator ID Separation (HIMALIS) architecture for the New Generation Network. The HIMALIS architecture includes a new naming scheme for generating host names and IDs. It also includes a logical control network to store and distribute bindings between host names, IDs, locators and other information useful for providing support for network operation and control. The architecture uses such information to manage network dynamism (i.e., mobility, multihoming) and heterogeneity in network layer protocols. We verify the basic functions of the architecture by implementing and testing them using a testbed system.

Network virtualization has become a common research topic that many researchers consider a basis for defining a new generation network architectures. In this paper, we attempt to clarify the concept of network virtualization with its brief history, to introduce the benefit of network virtualization for the future network, to posit our strong belief in that the future network should adopt a form of a meta-architecture that accommodates multiple competing multiple architectures, and to identify challenges to achieving this architecture.

A new generation network is requested to accommodate an enormous number of heterogeneous nodes and a wide variety of traffic and applications. To achieve higher scalability, adaptability, and robustness than ever before, in this paper we present new network architecture composed of self-organizing entities. The architecture consists of the physical network layer, service overlay network layer, and common network layer mediating them. All network entities, i.e. nodes and networks, behave in a self-organizing manner, where the global behavior emerges through their operation on local information and direct and/or indirect mutual interaction. The center of the architecture is so-called self-organization engines, which implement nonlinear self-organizing dynamics originating in biology, physics, and mathematics. In this paper, we also show some examples of self-organization engines.

We present our proposed designs of optical access architecture based on WDM technology toward new-generation networks for two types of topologies: Single-star (SS) and passive-double-star (PDS). We adopt the concept of WDM-direct which links multiple wavelengths to each optical network unit (ONU). Our proposed architecture based on WDM-direct can achieve more than 10 Gbps access per ONU. Moreover, our architecture can provide not only conventional bandwidth-shared services but also bandwidth-guaranteed services requiring more than 10 Gbps bandwidth by establishing end-to-end lightpaths directly to each ONU, and thus meet high requirements of QoS in new-generation networks. Firstly, we show our proposed designs of SS-type architecture, and experimentally demonstrate the system. We confirm that the optical line terminal (OLT) successfully switches between packet/lightpath data transmissions for each ONU. In addition, we measure and evaluate optical power loss in upstream/downstream transmissions between the OLT and ONUs. Secondly, we show our proposed designs of PDS-type architecture, and theoretically analyze and evaluate the bit-rate capacity of the system.