Section: New Results

Algorithms: Content-Centric Networking

Participants : Christine Fricker, Philippe Robert, James Roberts, Nada Sbihi.

RAP participated in an ANR project named CONNECT which contributed to the definition and evaluation of a new paradigm for the future Internet: an information-centric network (ICN) where, rather than interconnecting remote hosts like IP, the network directly manages the information objects that users publish, retrieve and exchange. The project ended in December 2012 but we have continued to work on information-centric networking in 2013.

RAP is participating in an ANR project named CONNECT which contributes to the definition and evaluation of a new paradigm for the future Internet: a content-centric network (CCN) where, rather than interconnecting remote hosts like IP, the network directly manages the information objects that users publish, retrieve and exchange. CCN has been proposed by Van Jacobson and colleagues at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In CCN, content is divided into packet-size chunks identified by a unique name with a particular hierarchical structure. The name and content can be cryptographically encoded and signed, providing a range of security levels. Packets in CCN carry names rather than addresses and this has a fundamental impact on the way the network works. Security concerns are addressed at the content level, relaxing requirements on hosts and the network. Users no longer need a universally known address, greatly facilitating management of mobility and intermittent connectivity. Content is supplied under receiver control, limiting scope for denial of service attacks and similar abuse. Since chunks are self-certifying, they can be freely replicated, facilitating caching and bringing significant bandwidth economies. CCN applies to both stored content and to content that is dynamically generated, as in a telephone conversation, for example. RAP is contributing to the design of CCN in two main areas:

• the design and evaluation of traffic controls, recognizing that TCP is no longer applicable and queue management will require new, name-based criteria to ensure fairness and to realize service differentiation;

• the design and evaluation of replication and caching strategies that realize an optimal trade-off of expensive bandwidth for cheap memory.

The team also contributes to the development of efficient forwarding strategies and the elaboration of economic arguments that make CCN a viable replacement for IP. CONNECT partners are Alcatel-Lucent (lead), Orange, Inria/RAP, Inria/PLANETE, Telecom ParisTech, UPMC/LIP6.

A paper describing a proposed flow-aware approach for CCN traffic management and its performance evaluation has been presented at the conference Infocom 2012. We have reviewed the literature on cache performance (dating from early work on computer memory management) and identified a practical and versatile tool for evaluating the hit rate (proportion of requests that are satisfied from the cache) as a function of cache size and the assumed object popularity law. This approximate method was first proposed in 2002 by Che, Tung and Wang for their work on web caching. We applied this approximation to evaluate CCN caching performance taking into account the huge population and diverse popularity characteristics that make other approaches ineffective. The excellent accuracy of this method over a wide range of practically relevant traffic models has been explained mathematically. CONNECT ends in December 2012. We are currently defining a new project proposal that should be submitted to the ANR INFRA call in February 2013.