Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of five projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation under its Future Internet Architecture Program. NDN has its roots in an earlier project, Content-Centric Networking (CCN), which Van Jacobson first publicly presented in 2006. The NDN project investigates Jacobson's proposed evolution from today's host-centric network architecture (IP) to a data-centric network architecture (NDN). This conceptually simple shift has far-reaching implications for how we design, develop, deploy, and use networks and applications. We describe the motivation and vision of this new architecture, and its basic components and operations. We also provide a snapshot of its current design, development status, and research challenges. More information about the project, including prototype implementations, publications, and annual reports, is available on named-data.net.

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Named data networking

Network function virtualization (NFV) has drawn significant attention from both industry and academia as an important shift in telecommunication service provisioning. By decoupling network functions (NFs) from the physical devices on which they run, NFV has the potential to lead to significant reductions in operating expenses (OPEX) and capital expenses (CAPEX) and facilitate the deployment of new services with increased agility and faster time-to-value. The NFV paradigm is still in its infancy and there is a large spectrum of opportunities for the research community to develop new architectures, systems and applications, and to evaluate alternatives and trade-offs in developing technologies for its successful deployment. In this paper, after discussing NFV and its relationship with complementary fields of software defined networking (SDN) and cloud computing, we survey the state-of-the-art in NFV, and identify promising research directions in this area. We also overview key NFV projects, standardization efforts, early implementations, use cases, and commercial products.

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Network Function Virtualization: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges

The current Internet architecture was founded upon a host-centric communication model, which was appropriate for coping with the needs of the early Internet users. Internet usage has evolved however, with most users mainly interested in accessing (vast amounts of) information, irrespective of its physical location. This paradigm shift in the usage model of the Internet, along with the pressing needs for, among others, better security and mobility support, has led researchers into considering a radical change to the Internet architecture. In this direction, we have witnessed many research efforts investigating Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as a foundation upon which the Future Internet can be built. Our main aims in this survey are: (a) to identify the core functionalities of ICN architectures, (b) to describe the key ICN proposals in a tutorial manner, highlighting the similarities and differences among them with respect to those core functionalities, and (c) to identify the key weaknesses of ICN proposals and to outline the main unresolved research challenges in this area of networking research.

A Survey of Information-Centric Networking Research

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has seen a significant resurgence in recent years. ICN promises benefits to users and service providers along several dimensions (e.g., performance, security, and mobility). These benefits, however, come at a non-trivial cost as many ICN proposals envision adding significant complexity to the network by having routers serve as content caches and support nearest-replica routing. This paper is driven by the simple question of whether this additional complexity is justified and if we can achieve these benefits in an incrementally deployable fashion. To this end, we use trace-driven simulations to analyze the quantitative benefits attributed to ICN (e.g., lower latency and congestion). Somewhat surprisingly, we find that pervasive caching and nearest-replica routing are not fundamentally necessary---most of the performance benefits can be achieved with simpler caching architectures. We also discuss how the qualitative benefits of ICN (e.g., security, mobility) can be achieved without any changes to the network. Building on these insights, we present a proof-of-concept design of an incrementally deployable ICN architecture.

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Less pain, most of the gain: incrementally deployable ICN

In recent years, the rapid urbanization of world’s population causes many economic, social, and environmental problems, which affect people’s living conditions and quality of life significantly. The concept of “smart city” brings opportunities to solve these urban problems. The objectives of smart cities are to make the best use of public resources, provide high-quality services to the citizens, and improve the people’s quality of life. Information and communication technology plays an important role in the implementation of smart cities. Blockchain as an emerging technology has many good features, such as trust-free, transparency, pseudonymity, democracy, automation, decentralization, and security. These features of blockchain are helpful to improve smart city services and promote the development of smart cities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the literature involving blockchain technology applied to smart cities. First, the related works and background knowledge are introduced. Then, we review how blockchain technology is applied in the realm of smart cities, from the perspectives of smart citizen, smart healthcare, smart grid, smart transportation, supply chain management, and others. Finally, some challenges and broader perspectives are discussed.

A Survey of Blockchain Technology Applied to Smart Cities: Research Issues and Challenges

The Internet is straining to meet demands that its design never anticipated, such as supporting billions of mobile devices and transporting huge amounts of multimedia content. The publish-subscribe Internet (PSI) architecture, a clean slate information-centric networking approach to the future Internet, was designed to satisfy the current and emerging user demands for pervasive content delivery, which the Internet can no longer handle. This article provides an overview of the PSI architecture, explaining its operation from bootstrapping to information delivery, focusing on its support for network layer caching and seamless mobility, which make PSI an excellent platform for ubiquitous information delivery.

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Caching and mobility support in a publish-subscribe internet architecture

In this paper we focus on the issue of transferring diverse kinds of information through information-centric networks (ICNs). We argue that the one request per packet mode of operation suggested in the early development of ICN applications is not a good fit for some types of traffic, such as media streams and real-time notifications. To efficiently deliver all kinds of information, we argue that an ICN should not only identify information by its name, it should also be aware of the nature of its traffic. We classify information traffic types based on two characteristics: a) reliable vs. unreliable transfer and b) real-time vs. on-demand delivery. The combination of these two characteristics leads to three broad categories: a) channels, b) on-demand documents and c) real-time documents. To handle all traffic types, we propose two extensions to the CCN architecture: Persistent Interests and Reliable Notifications. We describe how these additions, together with a careful selection of information names, can efficiently support these three categories of information traffic types.

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Supporting diverse traffic types in information centric networks

Routers in the Content-Centric Networking (CCN) architecture maintain state for all pending content requests, so as to be able to later return the corresponding content. By employing stateful forwarding, CCN supports native multicast, enhances security and enables adaptive forwarding, at the cost of excessive forwarding state that raises scalability concerns. We propose a semi-stateless forwarding scheme in which, instead of tracking each request at every on-path router, requests are tracked at every d hops. At intermediate hops, requests gather reverse path information, which is later used to deliver responses between routers using Bloom filter-based stateless forwarding. Our approach effectively reduces forwarding state, while preserving the advantages of CCN forwarding. Evaluation results over realistic ISP topologies show that our approach reduces forwarding state by 54%-70% in unicast delivery, without any bandwidth penalties, while in multicast delivery it reduces forwarding state by 34%-55% at the expense of 6%-13% in bandwidth overhead.

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Reducing forwarding state in content-centric networks with semi-stateless forwarding.

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a paradigm that aims to better reflect current Internet usage patterns by focusing on information, rather than on hosts. One of the most critical ICN functionalities is the efficient resolution/location of information objects i.e., name resolution. The vast size of the information object namespace calls for a highly scalable and efficient name resolution approach. Currently proposed solutions either rely on a DHT structure, thus ensuring load balancing and scalability at the cost of inefficient routing, or on hierarchical structures, thus preserving routing efficiency at the cost of limited scalability. In this paper, we study in detail the tradeoff between state/signaling overhead versus routing efficiency for a generic name-resolution system based on a novel DHT scheme with enhanced routing properties, and compare it to DONA, an ICN architecture based on hierarchical resolution and routing.

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Christos Tsilopoulos

Papers

A Survey of Information-Centric Networking Research

Caching and mobility support in a publish-subscribe internet architecture

Supporting diverse traffic types in information centric networks

Reducing forwarding state in content-centric networks with semi-stateless forwarding.

On inter-domain name resolution for information-centric networks