Towards a Context-Aware Forwarding Plane in Named Data Networking supporting QoS

Abstract

The emergence of Information-Centric Networking~(ICN) provides considerable opportunities for context-aware data distribution in the network's forwarding plane. While packet forwarding in classical IP-based networks is basically predetermined by routing, ICN foresees an adaptive forwarding plane considering the requirements of network applications. As research in this area is still at an early stage, most of the work so far focused on providing the basic functionality, rather than on considering the available context information to improve Quality of Service (QoS). This article investigates to which extent existing forwarding strategies take account of the available context information and can therefore increase service quality. The article examines a typical scenario encompassing different user applications (Voice over IP, video streaming, and classical data transfer) with varying demands (context), and evaluates how well the applications' requirements are met by the existing strategies.

QoS in Forwarding Strategies for ICN: New Algorithm and Experimental Evaluation

“…This forwarding strategy is tested against best-route (BR) forwarding strategy, achieving better results than the latter one, concerning mean delivery time and hop count of data packets. Another forwarding strategy is proposed in [7], where weights are defined for each kind of traffic to forward interest packets. Depending on the content request that arrives in a router, it will have a different priority regarding which interface should be chosen, derived from its weights.…”

“…Depending on the content request that arrives in a router, it will have a different priority regarding which interface should be chosen, derived from its weights. The goal, in [7], is to explore the capability of using information about various services in a single forwarding strategy, increasing QoS. The work in [8] defines the forwarding priority of an interest to an interface based on its class.…”

“…Although the efforts in the literature represent significant advances for service differentiation in ICN, none of them treats the influence of individual FS in distinct applications. FS mentioned above ( [6], [7] and [8]), are focused in adaptable strategies that can cope with distinct demands. Namely, one could phrase the goal of such contributions as following: if only one forwarding strategy would be used for all traffics, how could it be leveraged for QoS purposes.…”

“…Multiple simulation runs were made with sufficient time to enable the tested FS to perform packet forwarding decisions for several packets. The simulations were conducted in a customized ndnSIM, provided by [7], with the support to estimated voice, video and data quality, as well as the respective applications needed and the FS RFA and OMP-IF implemented (MCS and BR are default strategies in ndnSIM). IPI was implemented by the authors and the scenarios defined next were designed in this customized ndnSIM.…”

“…Although these constraints might reduce the possibilities of FS proposals in IP, in NDN, loop detection is already present with the use of a nonce mechanism in interest packets, and there is no need to limit the forwarding of packets from a specific flow to only one path since NDN favors content retrieval instead of end-to-end connections. In this manner, a plethora of FS has been proposed considering different metrics for forwarding decisions such as delay, content popularity and cache hit ratio [6], [7], [8].…”