Jordan Augé

Anchor-Less Producer Mobility in ICN

Mobility has become a basic premise of almost any network communication, thereby requiring a native integration into next generation 5G networks. Despite the numerous efforts to propose and to standardize effective mobility management models for IP, the result is a very complex, poorly flexible set of mechanisms not suitable for the design of a radio-agnostic 5G mobile core. The natural support for mobility, security and storage offered by ICN (Information-Centric Networking) architecture, makes it a good candidate to define a radically new solution relieving limitations of traditional approaches. If consumer mobility is supported in ICN by design in virtue of its connectionless pull-based communication model, producer mobility still appears to be an open challenge. In this work we describe an initial proposal for an anchor-less approach to manage producer mobility via Interest Updates/Notifications in the data plane, even in presence of latency-sensitive applications. We detail the different operations triggered by producer movements and position our contribution in the context of existing alternatives, by discussing either user performance and network metrics.

Virtualized ICN (vICN): towards a unified network virtualization framework for ICN experimentation

To assess the feasibility and potential for deployment of new networking paradigms such as ICN, being able to carry out large scale experimentation and tests in real operational networks is crucial. Various platforms have been developed by the research community to support design and evaluation of specific aspects of ICN architecture. Most of them provide ICN-dedicated, small scale or application-specific environments and ad-hoc testing tools, non reusable in other contexts nor in real-world IP deployments. The goal of this paper is to contribute vICN (virtualized ICN), a unified open-source framework for network configuration and management that uses recent progresses in resource isolation and virtualization techniques. It offers a single, flexible and scalable platform to serve different purposes, ranging from reproducible large-scale research experimentation, to demonstrations with emulated and/or physical devices and network resources and to real deployments of ICN in existing IP networks. In the paper, we describe the rationale for vICN and its components, highlighting programmability, scalability and reliability as its core principles. Illustration of vICN properties is provided through concrete examples.

Secure producer mobility in information-centric network

One of the fundamental requirements of the next generation 5G networks is to support seamless mobility over an heterogeneous access network by design. The shift from host-based to content-based location-independent communication makes Information-Centric Networking (ICN) an appealing technology to provide not only mobility, but also security and storage as native properties of the network architecture. Previous work in ICN literature focused on name-based mobility management solutions and particularly on the challenges of producer mobility, which involves an interaction between forwarding and control plane. In this paper, we consider the security implications of producer mobility in ICN and we highlight the importance of securing producer to network interactions. We focus on the problem of prefix hijacking: a class of attacks that can be exploited to threaten both the security of the ICN networks and the privacy of its users. To prevent this class of attacks, we propose a fully distributed and very low-overhead protocol for name prefix attestation based on hash-chaining. First results show order of magnitudes improvement in verification latency with respect to signature verification, the leading alternative approach to thwart prefix hijacking attacks.

Simple and efficient ICN network virtualization with vICN

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has been proposed as an alternative to IP for future networks such as 5G. To speed up its development and adoption, researchers and engineers require testing tools that are both simple and scalable. In particular, it is crucial to be able to quickly deploy ICN-enabled network topologies in a flexible and efficient manner. In this demonstration, we showcase vICN (virtualized ICN), a platform that enables easy deployment, orchestration and management of ICN networks. vICN uses standard virtualization technologies such as Linux Containers (LXC) and is fully integrated with the CICN suite to enable flexible testing of ICN technologies on general-purpose hardware. Furthermore, it can perform live monitoring and modification of the network. In particular, we use vICN to deploy a simple topology that consists of 9 nodes. We show that vICN bootstraps the topology in about 60s on commodity hardware. We then demonstrate how vICN interacts with the virtualized network and how it can be used for easy experimentation.

Enhancing Mobile Video Delivery over an Heterogeneous Network Access with Information-Centric Networking

Mobile video delivery drives Internet traffic evolution and puts colossal pressure on future 5G networks to support higher quality and lower latency requirements over an increasingly heterogeneous network access. Future Internet paradigms recentering communication around content, such as Information Centric Networks (ICN), appear as promising candidates to relieve the challenges of a mobility-robust, efficient and cost-effective video delivery, by integrating video-awareness at network layer. In this demo, we focus on ICN-enabled Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (DAS) over an heterogeneous wireless access. We integrate ICN capabilities in DAS clients requesting 4K video content to standard DAS servers. We deploy a virtualized ICN-enabled network slice using LXC containers to connect clients to servers through an heterogeneous wireless access (802.11n and LTE emulated radios) and a simplified backhaul. The contribution of the demo is twofold. First it showcases what ICN can bring to DAS over a mobile heterogeneous access in virtue of its content-awareness at network layer. Second, it offers to the user a rich sandbox where several state-of-the-art DAS controllers are implemented and can be tested over ICN or standard TCP.