Hitoshi Asaeda

DataClouds: Enabling Community-Based Data-Centric Services Over the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as one of the major trends for the next evolution of the Internet, where billions of physical objects or things (including but not limited to humans) will be connected over the Internet, and a vast amount of information data will be shared among them. However, the current Internet was built on a host-centric communication model, which was primarily designed for meeting the demand of pair-wise peer-to-peer communications and cannot well accommodate various advanced data-centric services boosted by the IoT in which users care about content and are oblivious to locations where the content is stored. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for the future Internet based on information-centric networking (ICN), which is called DataClouds, to better accommodate data-centric services. Different from existing ICN-based architectures, we take the sharing nature of data-centric services under the IoT into consideration and introduce logically and physically formed communities as the basic building blocks to construct the network so that data could be more efficiently shared and disseminated among interested users. We also elaborate on several fundamental design challenges for the Internet under this new architecture and show that DataClouds could offer more efficient and flexible solutions than traditional ICN-based architectures.

Performance analysis of a high-performance real-time application with several AL-FEC schemes

Real-time streaming applications typically require minimizing packet loss and transmission delay so as to keep the best possible playback quality. From this point of view, IP datagram losses (e.g. caused by a congested router, or caused by a short term fading problem with wireless transmissions) have major negative impacts. Although Application Layer Forward Error Correction (AL-FEC) is a useful technique for protecting against packet loss, the playback quality is largely sensitive to the AL-FEC code/codec features and the way they are used. In this work, we consider three FEC schemes for the erasure channel: 2D parity check codes, Reed-Solomon over GF(28) codes, and LDPC-Staircase codes, all of them being currently standardized within IETF. We have integrated these FEC schemes in the FECFRAME framework, a framework that is also being standardized at IETF, and whose goal is to integrate AL-FEC schemes in real-time protocol stacks in a simple and flexible way. Then we modified the Digital Video Transport System (DVTS) high-performance real-time video streaming application so that it can benefit from FECFRAME in order to recover from transmission impairments. We then carried out several performance evaluations in order to identify, for a given loss rate, the optimal configuration in which DVTS performs the best.

Low latency low loss streaming using in-network coding and caching

Owing to the rapid growth in high-quality video streaming over the Internet, preserving high-level robustness against data loss and low latency, while maintaining higher data transmission rates, is becoming an increasingly important issue for high-quality real-time delay-sensitive streaming. In this paper, we propose a low latency, low loss streaming mechanism, L4C2, specialized for high-quality delay-sensitive streaming. With L4C2, nodes in the network estimate the acceptable delay and packet loss probability in their uplinks, aiming at retrieving lost data packets from in-network cache and/or coded data packets using in-network coding within an acceptable delay, by extending the Content-Centric Networking (CCN) approach. Further, L4C2 naturally provides multiple paths and multicast technologies to efficiently utilize network resources while sharing network resources fairly with competing data flows by adjusting the video quality when necessary. We validate through comprehensive simulations that L4C2 achieves a high success probability of data transmission considering the acceptable one-way delay, and higher QoE while suppressing the interest and redundant data traffic than the proposed multipath congestion control mechanism in CCN.

Contrace: a tool for measuring and tracing content-centric networks

Content-Centric Networks (CCNs) are fundamental evolutionary technologies that promise to form the cornerstone of the future Internet. The information flow in these networks is based on named data requesting, in-network caching, and forwarding, which are unique and can be independent of IP routing. As a result, common IP-based network tools such as ping and traceroute can neither trace a forwarding path in CCNs nor feasibly evaluate CCN performance. We propose “contrace,” a network tool for CCNs (particularly, CCNx implementation running on top of IP) that can be used to investigate the round-trip time (RTT) between content forwarder and consumer, the states of in-network cache per name prefix, and the forwarding path information per name prefix. We report a series of experiments conducted using contrace on a CCN topology created on a local testbed and the GEANT network topology emulated by the Mini-CCNx emulator. The results confirm that contrace is not only a useful tool for monitoring and operating a network, but also a helpful analysis tool for enhancing the design of CCNs. Further, contrace can report the number of received interests per cache or per chunk on the forwarding routers. This enables us to estimate the content popularity and design more effective cache control mechanisms in experimental networks.

Architecture for IP multicast deployment: Challenges and practice

SUMMARY IP multicast technology is highly advantageous for various applications and future needs in the Internet. Yet, it is generally recognized that the IP multicast routing protocol is fairly complex and nonscalable and requires additional maintenance and operational cost to network administrators. Although there has been much research related to IP multicast and most router vendors already support basic IP multicast routing protocols, there is still a big gap between what is reported as the stateof-the-art in the literature from what is implemented in practice. In this paper, we clarify the complexities of traditional multicast communication and describe possible solutions using the one-to-many multicast communication model called Source-Specific Multicast (SSM). We explain this communication model and the corresponding routing architecture and examine the statistics obtained for the number of multicast routing entries in our backbone router, which is connected to the international backbone. We also introduce our international collaboration activities that are contributing to the deployment and promotion of IP multicast services in the Internet.

A design of an ICN architecture within the framework of SDN

The core design principle of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is in the name based routing that enables users to ask for a data object by its name and makes the network deliver it to users from a nearby cache if available. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) lowers the cost and complexity of network management by decoupling architecture from infrastructure, which promises the continuous evolution of the network architecture in a flexible manner. The synergy between ICN supporting efficient data dissemination as the norm and SDN providing flexible management framework enables the combination to be a fully controllable framework for efficient data dissemination. In this paper, we propose a design of an ICN architecture within the framework of SDN.

A community-oriented route coordination using information centric networking approach

The accommodation of growing tussles among different communities and the efficient and robust information dissemination in cyberspace have become crucial challenges for future network design, while the current Internet is ossified into the principle of end-to-end communications. To satisfy these challenges, in this paper we devise a community-oriented route coordination (CORIN) system using information-centric networking approach to naturally and efficiently provide community-based information dissemination and retrieval with name-integrated forwarding. The proposed CORIN modularizes users into communities, lets them express their interests and choices, and enables information objects to be searchable and retrievable in community units. We conduct performance analysis, which shows that CORIN can greatly reduce the control packet overhead compared with PURSUIT for community communication service provision.

Adaptive Rate Control with Dynamic FEC for Real-Time DV Streaming

For higher streaming quality, a data sender adjusts the data transmission rate according to the network condition between the sender and receiver. The sender and the receiver exchange information about the network condition to decide the appropriate transmission rate. However, monitoring each data flow in real time is difficult, and controlling the sender to adjust the best quality for each receiver in a heterogeneous environment is a real challenge. In this paper, we study packet loss patterns and FEC recovery rate upon data transmission in a congested network, and define an adaptive rate control mechanism that dynamically adjusts the transmission rate and the FEC encoding rate. We then show our adaptive DV Transmission System (DVTS) that supports appropriate rate control for provisioning multimedia streaming with the best possible quality, and evaluate the system on top of our testbed network.

Implementation of group member authentication protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks

In a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) architecture, there is no pre-existing fixed network infrastructure, and a mobile node in this network sends data packets to a destination node directly or through its neighbor nodes. This situation is of potential security concern since the neighbor nodes cannot be always trusted. In this paper, we design a group member authentication protocol used in a MANET. It aims to allow a set of nodes to legitimately participate in group communication and then distribute a secret group key to the approved nodes to establish secure communication with group members. Our protocol provides knowledge-based group member authentication, which recognizes a list of secret group keys held in a mobile node as the nodes group membership. It employs zero knowledge proof and threshold cryptography. We then introduce our actual implementation and evaluate the behavior to ensure its successful deployment

Content Hunting for In-Network Cache: Design and Performance Analysis

In-network caching is a core technology for saving network resources and improving the response time in Information-/Content-Centric Networking (ICN/CCN). In an ordinary ICN/CCN, content name based routing is used to find cached content in the network. Although there have been several studies on effective and efficient cache retrieval from in-network caches, we propose a novel content hunting scheme, named Local Tree Hunting (LTH) from the point of view to approach the ideal performance. LTH hunts for the closest node to the request node among the nodes with disseminated cache content. It autonomously adjusts the hunting area by changing the size of the hunting tree depending on the degree to which the content has been disseminated through the network. The proposed scheme was verified in a performance analysis; it was shown to have almost the same level of performance as the case of finding the true closest node. System architecture and operations based on the proposed scheme are also described.