Christopher N. Ververidis

A Survey of Information-Centric Networking Research

The current Internet architecture was founded upon a host-centric communication model, which was appropriate for coping with the needs of the early Internet users. Internet usage has evolved however, with most users mainly interested in accessing (vast amounts of) information, irrespective of its physical location. This paradigm shift in the usage model of the Internet, along with the pressing needs for, among others, better security and mobility support, has led researchers into considering a radical change to the Internet architecture. In this direction, we have witnessed many research efforts investigating Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as a foundation upon which the Future Internet can be built. Our main aims in this survey are: (a) to identify the core functionalities of ICN architectures, (b) to describe the key ICN proposals in a tutorial manner, highlighting the similarities and differences among them with respect to those core functionalities, and (c) to identify the key weaknesses of ICN proposals and to outline the main unresolved research challenges in this area of networking research.

Service discovery for mobile Ad Hoc networks: a survey of issues and techniques

This article surveys research in service advertising, discovery, and selection for mobile ad hoc networks and related issues. We include a categorization of service discovery architectures for MANETs and their modes of operation, presenting their merits and drawbacks. We pay particular attention to cross-layer service discovery - a special class of efficient service discovery approaches for MANETs. We also present security issues and discuss service description options, service selection mechanisms, and service-state maintenance techniques. We conclude with a summary, an outlook, and directions for future research in this area.

MobiShare: sharing context-dependent data & services from mobile sources

The rapid advances in wireless communications technology and mobile computing have enabled personal mobile devices that we use in everyday life to become information and service providers by complementing or replacing fixed-location hosts connected to the wireline network. Such mobile resources is highly important for other moving users, creating significant opportunities for many interesting and novel applications. The MobiShare architecture provides the infrastructure for ubiquitous mobile access and mechanisms for publishing, discovering and accessing heterogeneous mobile resources in a large area, taking into account the context of both sources and requestors. Any wireless communication technology could be used between a device and the system. Furthermore, the use of XML-related languages and protocols for describing and exchanging metadata gives the system a uniform and easily adaptable interface, allowing a variety of devices to use it. The overall approach is data-centric and service-oriented, implying that all devices are treated as producers or requestors of data wrapped as information services.

On inter-domain name resolution for information-centric networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a paradigm that aims to better reflect current Internet usage patterns by focusing on information, rather than on hosts. One of the most critical ICN functionalities is the efficient resolution/location of information objects i.e., name resolution. The vast size of the information object namespace calls for a highly scalable and efficient name resolution approach. Currently proposed solutions either rely on a DHT structure, thus ensuring load balancing and scalability at the cost of inefficient routing, or on hierarchical structures, thus preserving routing efficiency at the cost of limited scalability. In this paper, we study in detail the tradeoff between state/signaling overhead versus routing efficiency for a generic name-resolution system based on a novel DHT scheme with enhanced routing properties, and compare it to DONA, an ICN architecture based on hierarchical resolution and routing.

Extended ZRP: a routing layer based service discovery protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Service discovery in mobile ad hoc networks is an essential process in order for these networks to be self-configurable with zero or minimal administration overhead. In this paper we argue that service discovery can be greatly enhanced in terms of efficiency (regarding service discoverability and energy consumption), by piggybacking service information into routing layer messages. Thus, service discovery does not generate additional messages and a node requesting a service, in addition to discovering that service, it is simultaneously informed of the route to the service provider. We extended the zone routing protocol (ZRP) in order to encapsulate service information in its routing messages. Extensive simulations demonstrate the superiority of this routing layer-based service discovery scheme over that of a similar, but application layer based service discovery scheme.

Evaluation of quality of experience for video streaming over dynamic spectrum access systems

In this paper we study the problem of quantifying the value of spectrum opportunities to secondary users in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) systems. We especially focus on estimating the impact of key channel parameters, namely the activity patterns of the primary users on the expected quality of experience for secondary users accessing video streams over a DSA system. In our study we consider three basic types of video representing typical video content categorized according to scene change rate ranging from low-activity newscast to high-activity sports video. Through extensive simulations we show that given some information on the expected level of activity in the video, the duty cycle of the primary user alone can yield good predictors for the expected quality of experience of secondary users. Knowledge of the precise distributions of the primary user ON and OFF periods can be used to further enhance the precision of the prediction, but at least for exponential and log-normal channel access patterns the differences are rather small. Finally, we study the problem of determining the channel statistics that are needed to apply the predictor in an optimization setting. Our simulations show that high accuracy can be achieved in matter of minutes of estimation time, which is more than enough for practical deployments in typical urban environments.

Optimizing the channel load reporting process in IEEE 802.11k-enabled WLANs

IEEE 802.11 k is an extension of the IEEE 802.11 specification for radio resource measurements. In an IEEE 802.11 k-enabled wireless LAN, an access point or other network element may request from a client or another access point to monitor and report the load of a channel. We call the latter a channel monitoring station. In this paper we propose a mechanism for a channel monitoring station to efficiently derive accurate values of channel load.We especially focus on optimizing the duration of channel monitoring and thus minimize the impact on applications. Note that such mechanisms are critical for the success of new sharing regimes such as cognitive radio and open spectrum access.

Satellite-Terrestrial Integration Scenarios for Future Information-Centric Networks

This paper addresses scenarios of integrated satellite-terrestrial Future Internet networks based on the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) communication paradigm. Focus is given on three integration scenarios: i) Hybrid Broadcast IPTV, paving the way for SatCom integration within the Future Media Internet; ii) Smart M2M Transport, paving the way for SatCom integration within a future Internet of Things; and iii) Extended 4G Backhauling, paving the way for SatCom integration within the 4G mobile Internet.

Distributed channel selection protocol for single-hop transmissions in cognitive radio networks

We propose a distributed channel selection protocol for cognitive radio networks that are organized as ad hoc architectures considering single hop transmission. The channel selection is performed over a common control channel in such a way that channel congestion as well as heavy sensing effort is avoided. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol significantly outperforms a random channel selection protocol.

AVERT: Adaptive SerVicE and Route Discovery ProTocol for MANETs

In the past few years there has been increasing research interest in service discovery protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). The most promising approaches so far address energy efficiency by merging the service discovery process with the routing process. Actually the service information is piggy-backed into routing messages, so that a node is simultaneously informed of available services and of routes towards the corresponding service providers. This cross layering leads to improved adaptation to the network conditions and at the same time to significant energy savings. Those savings are infeasible if the two processes are implemented separately, because then each one would have to use its own messages and create additional (if not) redundant network overhead. In this paper we propose such a hybrid adaptive protocol for energy consumption-avert users. This protocol, named AVERT, is based on the independent zone routing framework (IZR) and has the ability to allow each node to adapt its zone range (similarly to the way it is done in IZR). We also add a mechanism to adapt the sending rate of proactive messages on each node based only on local traffic monitoring. Through simulations we show that using this mechanism, the energy efficiency achieved is substantially higher compared to similar hybrid service and route discovery protocols.