Section: New Results

Routing

Probabilistic Energy-Aware Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Participants : Evangelia Tsiontsiou, Bernardetta Addis, Alberto Ceselli [Universita degli Studi di Milano] , Ye-Qiong Song [contact] .

Healthcare applications are considered as promising fields for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and globally IoT. Thanks to WSNs, patients can be monitored in hospitals or smart home environments, providing health improvement, or emergency care. Network lifetime is still the key issue when we deploy wireless sensor networks and IoT solutions in real-world applications. Current WSN research trends include duty-cycling at MAC layer and energy efficient routing at network layer, among others. We proposed an Optimal Probabilistic Energy-Aware Routing Protocol (OPEAR) for duty-cycled WSNs which aims at maximizing the network lifetime by keeping low energy consumption and balancing network traffic between nodes. Our experimental campaign reveals that our OPEAR protocol outperforms the popular Energy Aware Routing Protocol (EAR) from the literature, proving to be more effective in extending the network lifetime [33]. It is part of Lorraine AME Satelor project granted by Lorraine Region.

NDN router with P4

Participants : Salvatore Signorello [University of Luxembourg] , Olivier Festor [contact] , Radu State [University of Luxembourg] , Jérôme François.

Although content-awareness at the network level is becoming more and more needed, Information-Centric Networking (ICN)-based solutions struggle to emerge. Research on ICN has already produced insightful outputs, nevertheless architecture-tied designs of ICN devices cannot be easily deployed and tested in operational networks; further those designs are hard to share. In the meantime, the vision of Software-Defined Networking has grown and taken new shapes. Network players desire to change devices' behavior often and drastically, even though performances are still crucial to operate at line-speed. This has been leading to a rethink of network devices designs with the aim to offer full-programmability through high-level programming languages for packet processors, like P4. It is a programming language to describe the forwarding plane of network devices. The language abstracts how packets are processed by different devices in target- independent programs. Then, compilers map those programs to different forwarding devices with as final goal a single specification which can be automatically mapped to hardware or software implementations. Although high-level protocols like ICN with advanced parsing mechanisms are usually handled by software switch with standard programming capacity, P4 would allow more efficient implementation on specific platform. Our preliminary implementation strives to implement many features of the NDN routing by using native P4 language constructs only [32].

NDN/HTTP cohabitation

Participants : Thibault Cholez [contact] , Xavier Marchal, Olivier Festor.

Network operators are reluctant to deploy globally Named Data Networking (NDN) because of the huge investment costs required and the uncertainty about the security and the manageability of such disruptive network protocols when deployed in production, while the return of investment is also uncertain. Meanwhile, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) greatly facilitates the deployment of novel networking architectures by reducing the costs thanks to the usage of commodity hardware in place of dedicated equipments. Consequently, leveraging NFV to ease the deployment of NDN infrastructures appears as a strong mean to incite network operators to adopt this technology. In this context, the challenge we address in the ANR DOCTOR project is to fulfil the requirements needed to move NDN from a solution restricted to labs or tesbeds to a fully operational one by developing NDN-specific Virtual Network Functions (VNF).

In this effort, one of the main first questions which arise is about the integration of NDN into the existing Internet, and particularly the collocation of NDN with IP and HTTP. We think that a good way to deploy NDN consists in creating virtualized NDN island that can be crossed by specific content-related traffic, such as HTTP, and thus benefit from NDN properties (caching, aggregation, etc.). We proposed and developed an early version of a fully-capable NDN/HTTP gateway that can seamlessly connect a NDN network to the rest of the World Wide Web. This work was published and demonstrated at the ACM-ICN conference [47].