Francisco Renato C. Araújo

In wireless networks, the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture maximizes contents’ availability throughout multiple network paths based on multicast-based communication combined with stateful forwarding and caching in intermediate nodes. Despite its benefits, the downside of the architecture resides in the packet flooding not efficiently prevented by current forwarding strategies and mainly associated with the native flooding of the architecture or malicious packets from Interest Flooding Attack (IFA). This work introduces iFLAT, a multicriteria-based forwarding strategy for interest FLooding mitigATion on named data wireless networking. It follows a cross-layer approach that considers: (i) the Received Signal Strength (RSS) to adjust itself to the current status of the wireless network links, (ii) the network traffic (meInfo) to detect flooding issues and traffic anomalies, and (iii) a fake Interest Blacklist to identify IFA-related flooding. In doing so, the strategy achieves better efficiency on Interest flooding mitigation, addressing both native and IFA types of flooding. We evaluated the proposed strategy by reproducing a Flying Ad hoc Network (FANET) composed of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) featured by the NDN stack deployed in all nodes. Simulation results show that iFLAT can effectively detect and mitigate flooding, regardless of its origin or nature, achieving greater packet forwarding efficiency than competing strategies. In broadcast storm and IFA scenarios, it achieved 25.75% and 37.37% of traffic reduction, whereas Interest satisfaction rates of 16.36% and 51.78% higher, respectively.

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new network architecture based on the content-based model that has fundamental differences to the legacy path-based model. The first is focused on the content itself, and the latter focuses on the location of data. Both models provide different benefits to the end-user and the network, but they often cannot inter-operate due to their significant design differences. Therefore, we propose a new network architecture and protocol, both named NDN-Fab, to allow the inter-operation between path-based and content-based network architectures. NDN-Fab is based on the Fabric model and allows the edge network to operate with content-centric architectures, such as the NDN, while the core network can operate with a high-performance path-based communication model. The Core network uses the NDN-Fab protocol that can be embedded in the programmable data plane hardware of the core network’s switches, allowing for the sending of multicast packets and link-layer packet steering. Our results show that NDN-Fab can be more efficient in packet forwarding than IPv4, achieving up to 150 times lower average delay, 100 times lower network dispersion, and it managed to process 21% more packets.

IoT devices generate large continuous data streams, which causes congestion that compromises the scalability of IoT systems. To face this problem, techniques for data aggregation have been proposed to reduce recurring packet headers, through assembly of packet data coming from different sources. Due to the energy constraints and limitation of computational resources of devices, most proposals adjust data aggregation according to their features following multilayered-based approaches or coupling the solution to a given network protocol, but overlooking the properties of the communication link. In this work, we introduce the Internet of Things Protocol (IoTP). An L2 communication protocol for IoT programmable data planes that supports the implementation of data aggregation algorithms inside hardware switches, at the network level. Through these features, IoTP provides support for the design of efficient and adaptable aggregation schemes that can function according to network status and based on the different communication technologies used by IoT devices. We implemented IoTP using the P4 language and conducted emulation-based experiments through the Mininet environment. Our findings show that IoTP accomplishes a 78% improvement in network efficiency, as well as allowing control over the average delay generated by data aggregation techniques. Besides that, it was able to reduce the number of packets sent over the network, while also reducing the consumption of network devices computational resources.

In recent years, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures have been proposed to deal with many of the existing constraints of the current IP-based host-centric Internet model. The Named Data Networking (NDN) is an example of ICN, which is designed to meet many of the mobility challenges of IP-based networks. However, despite its benefits in supporting mobility of consumers, such architectures still lack efficient solutions for mobile producers, in particular, to improve contents availability during a producer’s handoff. In this paper, we introduce the Shared Caching in Named Data Networking Mobile (SCaN-Mob) strategy. It minimizes the effects of the mobile producers’ unavailability in NDN by creating an interest forwarding strategy and a cache replacement policy for seamless handoff of producer nodes in wireless networks. We proposed two SCaN-Mob approaches to mobile producer support: SCaN-Mob Full that uses all edge caching capacity, and SCaN-Mob AP that uses only the access point’s caching capacity. Simulations results show that SCaN-Mob improves the interest satisfaction rate, while decreases the delivery delay when compared to naive NDN and increases cache hit ratio concerning the other compared solutions.

In recent years, the Vehicular Named Data Network (VNDN) architecture has been proposed to face performance and reliability challenges from IP/host centric Vehicular Ad hoc Networks. The constant mobility of nodes in such networks can result in rapid flooding of unsatisfied interest packets thus leading to network overloads. In this article, we proposed LSIF, a Link Stability-based Interest Forwarding strategy that relies on predictions of link durations to reduce the number of interest and data packets. The simulation results revealed LSIFs benefits. It outperformed existing approaches in both urban and highway VNDN scenarios by significantly reducing interest and data packets but preserving good levels of interest satisfaction rates and low round-trip times.