Biblio

With the increasing diversity of application needs (datacenters, IoT, content retrieval, industrial automation, etc.), new network architectures are continually being proposed to address specific and particular requirements. From a network management perspective, it is both important and challenging to enable evolution towards such new architectures. Given the ubiquity of the Internet, a clean-slate change of the entire infrastructure to a new architecture is impractical. It is believed that we will see new network architectures coming into existence with support for interoperability between separate architectural islands. We may have servers, and more importantly, content, residing in domains having different architectures. This paper presents COIN, a content-oriented interoperability framework for current and future Internet architectures. We seek to provide seamless connectivity and content accessibility across multiple of these network architectures, including the current Internet. COIN preserves each domain's key architectural features and mechanisms, while allowing flexibility for evolvability and extensibility. We focus on Information-Centric Networks (ICN), the prominent class of Future Internet architectures. COIN avoids expanding domain-specific protocols or namespaces. Instead, it uses an application-layer Object Resolution Service to deliver the right "foreign" names to consumers. COIN uses translation gateways that retain essential interoperability state, leverages encryption for confidentiality, and relies on domain-specific signatures to guarantee provenance and data integrity. Using NDN and MobilityFirst as important candidate solutions of ICN, and IP, we evaluate COIN. Measurements from an implementation of the gateways show that the overhead is manageable and scales well.

Interconnecting resource-constrained devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) is generally achieved via IP-based technologies such as 6LoWPAN, which rely on the adaptation of the TCP/IP stack to fit IoT requirements. Very recent researches suggest that the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm, which switches the way to do networking, by fetching data by names regardless of their location, would provide native support for the functionalities required by IoT applications. Indeed, ICN intrinsic features, such as caching, naming, packet level security and stateful forwarding, favor it as a promising approach in the IoT. This paper gives a qualitative comparative study between the two communication paradigms (TCP/IP and ICN), and discusses their support for IoT environments, with a focus on the required key features such as mobility, scalability, and security.

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a Future Internet paradigm which uses named information (data objects) instead of host-based end-to-end communications. In-network caching is a key pillar of ICN. Basically, data objects are cached in ICN routers and retrieved from these network elements upon availability when they are requested. It is a particularly promising networking approach due to the expected benefits of data dissemination efficiency, reduced delay and improved robustness for challenging communication scenarios in IoT domain. From the security perspective, ICN concentrates on securing data objects instead of ensuring the security of end-to-end communication link. However, it inherently involves the security challenge of access control for content. Thus, an efficient access control mechanism is crucial to provide secure information dissemination. In this work, we investigate Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) as an access control apparatus for information centric IoT. Moreover, we elaborate on how such a system performs for different parameter settings such as different numbers of attributes and file sizes.

The shift from the host-centric to the information-centric paradigm results in many benefits including native security, enhanced mobility, and scalability. The corresponding information-centric networking (ICN), also presents several important challenges, such as closest replica routing, client privacy, and client preference collection. The majority of these challenges have received the research community’s attention. However, no mechanisms have been proposed for the challenge of effective client preferences collection. In the era of big data analytics and recommender systems customer preferences are essential for providers such as Amazon and Netflix. However, with content served from in-network caches, the ICN paradigm indirectly undermines the gathering of these essential individualized preferences. In this paper, we discuss the requirements for client preference collections and present potential mechanisms that may be used for achieving it successfully.

The shift from the host-centric to the information-centric paradigm results in many benefits including native security, enhanced mobility, and scalability. The corresponding information-centric networking (ICN), also presents several important challenges, such as closest replica routing, client privacy, and client preference collection. The majority of these challenges have received the research community’s attention. However, no mechanisms have been proposed for the challenge of effective client preferences collection. In the era of big data analytics and recommender systems customer preferences are essential for providers such as Amazon and Netflix. However, with content served from in-network caches, the ICN paradigm indirectly undermines the gathering of these essential individualized preferences. In this paper, we discuss the requirements for client preference collections and present potential mechanisms that may be used for achieving it successfully.

Content distribution in the Internet places content providers in a dominant position, with delivery happening directly between two end-points, that is, from content providers to consumers. Information-Centrism has been proposed as a paradigm shift from the host-to-host Internet to a host-to-content one, or in other words from an end-to-end communication system to a native distribution network. This trend has attracted the attention of the research community, which has argued that content, instead of end-points, must be at the center stage of attention. Given this emergence of information-centric solutions, the relevant management needs in terms of performance have not been adequately addressed, yet they are absolutely essential for relevant network operations and crucial for the information-centric approaches to succeed. Performance management and traffic engineering approaches are also required to control routing, to configure the logic for replacement policies in caches and to control decisions where to cache, for instance. Therefore, there is an urgent need to manage information-centric resources and in fact to constitute their missing management and control plane which is essential for their success as clean-slate technologies. In this thesis we aim to provide solutions to crucial problems that remain, such as the management of information-centric approaches which has not yet been addressed, focusing on the key aspect of route and cache management.