Biblio

The Internet, the de facto platform for large-scale content distribution, suffers from two issues that limit its manageability, efficiency, and evolution. First, the IP-based Internet is host-centric and agnostic to the content being delivered and, second, the tight coupling of the control and data planes restrict its manageability, and subsequently the possibility to create dynamic alternative paths for efficient content delivery. Here, we present the CURLING system that leverages the emerging Information-Centric Networking paradigm for enabling cost-efficient Internet-scale content delivery by exploiting multicasting and in-network caching. Following the software-defined networking concept that decouples the control and data planes, CURLING adopts an interdomain hop-by-hop content resolution mechanism that allows network operators to dynamically enforce/change their network policies in locating content sources and optimizing content delivery paths. Content publishers and consumers may also control content access according to their preferences. Based on both analytical modeling and simulations using real domain-level Internet subtopologies, we demonstrate how CURLING supports efficient Internet-scale content delivery without the necessity for radical changes to the current Internet.

Information Centric Networking (ICN) has been regarded as an ideal architecture for the next-generation network to handle users' increasing demand for content delivery with in-network cache. While making better use of network resources and providing better delivery service, an effective access control mechanism is needed due to wide dissemination of contents. However, in the existing solutions, making cache-enabled routers or content providers authenticate users' requests causes high computation overhead and unnecessary delay. Also, straightforward utilization of advanced encryption algorithms increases the opportunities for DoS attacks. Besides, privacy protection and service accountability are rarely taken into account in this scenario. In this paper, we propose a secure, efficient, and accountable access control framework, called SEAF, for ICN, in which authentication is performed at the network edge to block unauthorized requests at the very beginning. We adopt group signature to achieve anonymous authentication, and use hash chain technique to greatly reduce the overhead when users make continuous requests for the same file. Furthermore, the content providers can affirm the service amount received from the network and extract feedback information from the signatures and hash chains. By formal security analysis and the comparison with related works, we show that SEAF achieves the expected security goals and possesses more useful features. The experimental results also demonstrate that our design is efficient for routers and content providers, and introduces only slight delay for users' content retrieval.

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a content-oriented future Internet architecture, which well suits the increasingly mobile and information-intensive applications that dominate today's Internet. NDN relies on in-network caching to facilitate content delivery. This makes it challenging to enforce access control since the content has been cached in the routers and the content producer has lost the control over it. Due to its salient advantages in content delivery, network coding has been introduced into NDN to improve content delivery effectiveness. In this paper, we design ACNC, the first Access Control solution specifically for Network Coding-based NDN. By combining a novel linear AONT (All Or Nothing Transform) and encryption, we can ensure that only the legitimate user who possesses the authorization key can successfully recover the encoding matrix for network coding, and hence can recover the content being transmitted. In addition, our design has two salient merits: 1) the linear AONT well suits the linear nature of network coding; 2) only one vector of the encoding matrix needs to be encrypted/decrypted, which only incurs small computational overhead. Security analysis and experimental evaluation in ndnSIM show that our design can successfully enforce access control on network coding-based NDN with an acceptable overhead.

With the world population becoming increasingly urban and the multiplication of mega cities, urban leaders have responded with plans calling for so called smart cities relying on instantaneous access to information using mobile devices for an intelligent management of resources. Coupled with the advent of the smartphone as the main platform for accessing the Internet, this has created the conditions for the looming wireless bandwidth crunch. This paper presents a content delivery infrastructure relying on off-the-shelf technology and the public transportation network (PTN) aimed at relieving the wireless bandwidth crunch in urban centers. Our solution proposes installing WiFi access points on selected public bus stations and buses and using the latter as data mules, creating a delay tolerant network capable of carrying content users can access while using the public transportation. Building such an infrastructure poses several challenges, including congestion points in major hubs and the cost of additional hardware necessary for secure communications. To address these challenges we propose a 3-Tier architecture that guarantees end-to-end delivery and minimizes hardware cost. Trace-based simulations from three major European cities of Paris, Helsinki and Toulouse demonstrate the viability of our design choices. In particular, the 3-Tier architecture is shown to guarantee end-to-end connectivity and reduce the deployment cost by several times while delivering at least as many packets as a baseline architecture.