RFC 7927
Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Research Challenges
Pages: 38
Informational
Informational
Part 1 of 2 – Pages 1 to 17
Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) D. Kutscher, Ed. Request for Comments: 7927 NEC Category: Informational S. Eum ISSN: 2070-1721 Osaka University K. Pentikousis Travelping I. Psaras UCL D. Corujo Universidade de Aveiro D. Saucez INRIA T. Schmidt HAW Hamburg M. Waehlisch FU Berlin July 2016 Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Research ChallengesAbstract
This memo describes research challenges for Information-Centric Networking (ICN), an approach to evolve the Internet infrastructure to directly support information distribution by introducing uniquely named data as a core Internet principle. Data becomes independent from location, application, storage, and means of transportation, enabling or enhancing a number of desirable features, such as security, user mobility, multicast, and in-network caching. Mechanisms for realizing these benefits is the subject of ongoing research in the IRTF and elsewhere. This document describes current research challenges in ICN, including naming, security, routing, system scalability, mobility management, wireless networking, transport services, in-network caching, and network management. This document is a product of the IRTF Information-Centric Networking Research Group (ICNRG).
Status of This Memo This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes. This document is a product of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). The IRTF publishes the results of Internet-related research and development activities. These results might not be suitable for deployment. This RFC represents the consensus of the Information- Centric Networking Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). Documents approved for publication by the IRSG are not a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841. Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7927. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................4 2. Problems with Host-Centric Communications .......................4 3. ICN Terminology and Concepts ....................................6 3.1. Terminology ................................................6 3.2. Concepts ...................................................6 4. ICN Research Challenges .........................................8 4.1. Naming, Data Integrity, and Data Origin Authentication .....8 4.2. Security ..................................................10 4.2.1. Data Integrity and Origin Authentication ...........10 4.2.2. Binding NDOs to Real-World Identities ..............11 4.2.3. Access Control and Authorization ...................12 4.2.4. Encryption .........................................13 4.2.5. Traffic Aggregation and Filtering ..................13 4.2.6. State Overloading ..................................13 4.2.7. Delivering Data Objects from Replicas ..............14 4.2.8. Cryptographic Robustness ...........................14 4.2.9. Routing and Forwarding Information Bases ...........15 4.3. Routing and Resolution System Scalability .................15 4.3.1. Route-By-Name Routing ..............................15 4.3.2. Lookup-By-Name Routing .............................16 4.3.3. Hybrid Routing .....................................17 4.4. Mobility Management .......................................18 4.5. Wireless Networking .......................................20 4.6. Rate and Congestion Control ...............................22 4.7. In-Network Caching ........................................24 4.7.1. Cache Placement ....................................24 4.7.2. Content Placement: Content-to-Cache Distribution ...25 4.7.3. Request-to-Cache Routing ...........................26 4.7.4. Staleness Detection of Cached NDOs .................26 4.7.5. Cache Sharing by Multiple Applications .............27 4.8. Network Management ........................................27 4.9. ICN Applications ..........................................29 4.9.1. Web Applications ...................................30 4.9.2. Video Streaming and Download .......................30 4.9.3. Internet of Things .................................31 5. Security Considerations ........................................32 6. Informative References .........................................32 Acknowledgments ...................................................37 Authors' Addresses ................................................37
1. Introduction
Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an approach to evolve the Internet infrastructure to directly support accessing Named Data Objects (NDOs) as a first-order network service. Data objects become independent of location, application, storage, and means of transportation, allowing for inexpensive and ubiquitous in-network caching and replication. The expected benefits are improved efficiency and security, better scalability with respect to information/bandwidth demand, and better robustness in challenging communication scenarios. ICN concepts can be deployed by retooling the protocol stack: name- based data access can be implemented on top of the existing IP infrastructure, e.g., by allowing for named data structures, ubiquitous caching, and corresponding transport services, or it can be seen as a packet-level internetworking technology that would cause fundamental changes to Internet routing and forwarding. In summary, ICN can evolve the Internet architecture towards a network model based on named data with different properties and different services. This document presents the ICN research challenges that need to be addressed in order to achieve these goals. These research challenges are seen from a technical perspective, although business relationships between Internet players will also influence developments in this area. We leave business challenges for a separate document, however. The objective of this memo is to document the technical challenges and corresponding current approaches and to expose requirements that should be addressed by future research work. This document has been reviewed, commented on, and discussed extensively for nearly two years by the vast majority of ICNRG members, which certainly exceeds 100 individuals. It is the consensus of ICNRG that the research challenges described in this document should be published in the IRTF stream of the RFC series. This document does not constitute a standard.2. Problems with Host-Centric Communications
The best current practice to manage the above-mentioned growth in terms of data volume and number of devices is to increase infrastructure investment, employ application-layer overlays that cache content such as Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) and Peer- to-Peer (P2P) applications, provide location-independent access to data, and optimize its delivery. In principle, such platforms
provide a service model of accessing named data objects (NDOs) (e.g.,
replicated web resources in data centers) instead of a host-to-host
packet delivery service model.
However, since this functionality resides in overlays only, the full
potential of content distribution platforms cannot be leveraged as
the network is not aware of data requests and data transmissions.
This has the following impact:
o Data traffic typically follows sub-optimal paths as it is
effectively routed, depending on the overlay topology instead of
the Internet-layer topology.
o Network capabilities, such as multicast and broadcast, are largely
underutilized or not employed at all. As a result, request and
delivery for the same object have to be made multiple times.
o Overlays typically require significant infrastructure support,
e.g., authentication portals, content storage, and applications
servers, making it often impossible to establish local, direct
communication.
o The forwarding layer cannot cooperate with transport-layer
functions, so sometimes useful functionality such as local
retransmission and local rate control have to be implemented with
TCP proxies or other intermediaries.
o Provenance validation uses host authentication today. As such,
even if there are locally cached copies available, it is normally
not easily possible to validate their authenticity.
o Many applications follow their own approach to caching,
replication, transport, and authenticity validation (if at all),
although they all share similar models for accessing named data
objects in the network.
Host-centric communication systems restrict applications to data
transfer between end-hosts only. Naming data directly provides a
powerful "hook" for applications to exploit and natively support
multi-party communication, e.g., multi-source/multi-destination
communication and a ubiquitous information ecosystem that is not
restricted to end-host addresses.
3. ICN Terminology and Concepts
3.1. Terminology
Information-Centric Networking (ICN): A concept for communicating in a network that provides accessing named data objects as a first order service. See Section 3.2 for details. Named Data Object (NDO): Addressable data unit in an information- centric network that can represent a collection of bytes or a piece of information. In ICN, each data object has a name bound to it, and there are typically mechanisms to secure (and validate) this binding. Different ICN approaches have different concepts for how to map NDOs to individual units of transport, e.g., chunks and segments. Sometimes smaller units may be represented by NDOs themselves. Within the context of this document, an NDO is any named data object that can be requested from the network, and we do not consider sub-units below the NDO level. In this document, we often use the terms "NDO" and "data object" interchangeably. Requestor: Entity in an ICN network that is sending a request for a named data object to the network. Publisher: Entity in an ICN network that publishes an NDO to the network, so that corresponding requests can reach the publisher. The publisher does not need to be identical to the actual creator, for example, a publisher could provide the service of hosting NDOs on behalf of the actual creators/owners.3.2. Concepts
Fundamentally, ICN provides access to named data as a first-order network service, i.e., the network is able to serve requests to named data natively. That means network nodes can receive requests for named data and act as necessary, for example, by forwarding the request to a suitable next hop. Consequently, the network processes requests for named data objects (and corresponding responses) natively. Every network node on a path is enabled to perform forwarding decisions, cache objects, etc. This enables the network to forward such requests on optimal paths, employing the best transmission technologies at every node, e.g., broadcast/multicast transmission in wireless networks to avoid duplicate transmission of both requests and responses. In ICN, there is a set of common concepts and node requirements beyond this basic service model. Naming data objects is a key concept. In general, ICN names represent neither network nodes nor interfaces -- they represent NDOs independently of their location.
Names do play a key role in forwarding decisions and are used for matching requests to responses: in order to provide better support for accessing copies of NDOs regardless of their location, it is important to be able to validate that a response actually delivers the bits that correspond to an original request for named data. Name-content binding validation is a fundamental security service in ICN, and this is often achieved by establishing a verifiable binding between the object name and the actual object or an identity that has created the object. ICN can support other security services, such as provenance validation and encryption, depending on the details of naming schemes, object models, and assumptions on infrastructure support. Security services such as name-content binding validation are available to any node, i.e., not just the actual requestors. This is an important feature for enabling ingress gateways to check object authenticity to prevent denial-of-service attacks. Based on these fundamental properties, it is possible to leverage network storage ubiquitously: every ICN node can cache data objects and respond to requests for such objects -- it is not required to validate the authenticity of the node itself since name-content bindings can be validated. Ubiquitous in-network storage can be used for different purposes: it can enable sharing, i.e., the same object copy can be delivered to multiple users/nodes as in today's proxy caches and CDNs. It can also be used to make communication more robust (and perform better) by enabling the network to answer requests from local caches (instead of from origin servers). In case of disruption (message not delivered), a node can resend the request, and it could be answered by an on-path cache, i.e., on the other side of the disrupted link. The network itself would be able to send local retransmissions, which enables shorter round-trip times and the offloading of origin servers and other parts of the network. ICN potentially retrieves segments of NDOs from multiple data sources, so only a requestor can determine the completion of a retrieval process, i.e., the retrieval of NDOs or individual segments is typically controlled by a requestor. For this reason, ICN transport protocols are typically based on a receiver-driven mechanism: requestors can control message sending rates by regulating the request sending rate (assuming that every response message has to be triggered by a request message). Retransmission would be achieved by resending requests, e.g., after a timeout. Because objects can be replicated, object transmission and transport sessions would not necessarily have end-to-end semantics: requests can be answered by caches, and a node can select one or multiple next-hop destinations for a particular request depending on configuration, observed performance, or other criteria.
This receiver-driven communication model potentially enables new interconnection and business models: a request for named data can be linked to an interest of a requestor (or requesting network) in data from another peer, which could suggest modeling peering agreements and charging accordingly.4. ICN Research Challenges
4.1. Naming, Data Integrity, and Data Origin Authentication
Naming data objects is as important for ICN as naming hosts is for today's Internet. Fundamentally, ICN requires unique names for individual NDOs, since names are used for identifying objects independently of their location or container. In addition, since NDOs can be cached anywhere, the origin cannot be trusted anymore, hence the importance of establishing a verifiable binding between the object and its name (name-data binding validation) so that a requestor can be sure that the received bits do correspond to the NDO originally requested (data integrity). Data origin authentication is a different security service that can be related to naming, i.e., verifying that an NDO has indeed been published by a publisher (that could be identified by a name prefix). The above functions are fundamentally required for the information- centric network to work reliably; otherwise, neither network elements nor requestors can trust object authenticity. Lack of this trust enables several attacks, including DoS attacks, by injecting spoofed content into the network. There are different ways to use names and cryptography to achieve the desired functions [ICNNAMING] [ICNSURVEY], and there are different ways to manage namespaces correspondingly. Two types of naming schemes have been proposed in the ICN literature: hierarchical and flat namespaces. For example, a hierarchical scheme may have a structure similar to current URIs, where the hierarchy is rooted in a publisher prefix. Such hierarchy enables aggregation of routing information, improving scalability of the routing system. In some cases, names are human readable, which makes it possible for users to manually type in names, reuse, and, to some extent, map the name to the user intent. The second general class of naming schemes enables verifying the object's name-data integrity without requiring a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) or other third party to first establish trust in the key. This is achieved, e.g., by binding the hash of the NDO content to the object's name. For instance, this can be done by directly embedding the hash of the content in the name. Another option is an indirect binding, which embeds the public key of the
publisher in the name and signs the hash of the content with the
corresponding private key. The resulting names are typically non-
hierarchical, or flat, although the publisher field could be employed
to create a structure that could facilitate route aggregation.
There are several design trade-offs for ICN naming that affect
routing and security. Hash-based names are not human readable nor
hierarchical. They can, however, provide some structure for
aggregation, for instance, a name part corresponding to a publisher.
In hash-based names with indirect binding, the key of the publisher
is bound to the name of NDO, so when a user receives, e.g., the
triplet, namely (data, key, signature), the receiving entity can
verify that the NDO has been generated by the possessor of the
private/public key pair and that the NDO has not been changed in
transit (data integrity). This can be done by cryptographically
hashing the received key and the name of the NDO, and comparing it
with the received hashed key. Then, the key can be used to verify
the signature.
Data origin authentication can be achieved by validating signatures
based on public key cryptography about an NDO's name and content. In
order to ascertain data integrity and origin authenticity with such
an approach, a PKI-like system is required that would allow linking
the corresponding public key to a trust chain.
Research challenges specific to naming include:
o Naming static data objects can be performed by using content
hashes as part of object names, so that publishers can calculate
the hash over existing data objects and requestors, and any ICN
node can validate the name-content binding by recalculating the
hash and comparing it to the name (component). [RFC6920]
specifies a concrete naming format for this.
o Naming dynamic objects refers to use cases where the name has to
be generated before the object is created. For example, this
could be the case for live streaming, when a publisher wants to
make the stream available by registering stream chunk names in the
network. One approach to this can be hash-based names with
indirect binding as described above.
o Requestor privacy protection can be a challenge in ICN as a direct
consequence of the accessing-named-data-objects paradigm: if the
network can "see" requests and responses, it can also log request
history for network segments or individual users, which can be
undesirable, especially since names are typically expected to be
long-lived. That is, even if the name itself does not reveal much
information, the assumption is that the name can be used to
retrieve the corresponding data objects in the future.
o Updating and versioning NDOs can be challenging because it can
contradict fundamental ICN assumptions: if an NDO can be
replicated and stored in in-network storage for later retrieval,
names have to be long-lived and the name-content binding must not
change; updating an object (i.e., changing the content without
generating a new name) is not possible. Versioning is one
possible solution but requires a naming scheme that supports it
(and a way for requestors to learn about newer and older
versions).
o Managing accessibility can also be a challenge. In ICN, the
general assumption is to enable ubiquitous access to NDOs, but
there can be relevant use cases where access to objects should be
restricted, for example, to a specific user group. There are
different approaches for this, such as object encryption
(requiring key distribution and related mechanisms) or the concept
of scopes, e.g., based on names that can only be used/resolved
under some constraints.
4.2. Security
Security is an active research field in ICN. This section provides
an overview of important security features and corresponding
challenges that are related to shifting to information-centric
communications. Some challenges are well understood, and there are
(sometimes multiple different) approaches to address them, whereas
other challenges are active research and engineering topics.
4.2.1. Data Integrity and Origin Authentication
As mentioned in Section 4.1, data integrity verification is an
important ICN feature, since NDOs are retrieved not only from an
original copy holder but also from any caching point. Hence, the
communication channel endpoints to retrieve NDOs are not trustable
anymore, and solutions widely used today such as Transport Layer
Security (TLS) [RFC5246] cannot be used as a general solution. Since
data objects can be maliciously modified, ICN should provide
receivers with a security mechanism to verify the integrity of the
data object, and there are different ways to achieve this.
An efficient approach for static NDOs is providing a name-content- binding by hashing an NDO and using the hash as a part of the object's name. [RFC6920] provides a mechanism and a format for representing a digest algorithm and the actual digest in a name (amongst other information). For dynamic objects where it is desirable to refer to an NDO by name before the object has been created, public key cryptography is often applied, i.e., every NDO would be authenticated by means of a signature performed by the data object publisher so that any data object consumer can verify the validity of the data object based on the signature. However, in order to verify the signature of an object, the consumer must know the public key of the entity that signed the object. Data origin authentication, i.e., verifying that an NDO has indeed been published by a publisher, requires a secure binding of an NDO name to a publisher identity -- this is also typically implemented using public key cryptography, i.e., by requiring a receiver to verify digital signatures that are part of received messages. One research challenge is then to support a mechanism to distribute the publisher's public keys to the consumers of data objects. There are two main approaches to achieve this: one is based on an external third-party authority such as hierarchical Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) (see [RFC5280] for a description of hierarchical PKI), and the other is to adapt a hash-based scheme with indirect binding. The former, as the name implies, depends on an external third party authority to distribute the public key of the publisher for the consumers. In a hash-based scheme with indirect binding, the public key (or a hash of it) would be used as part of the name -- which is sufficient to validate the data integrity. In cases where information about the origin of a data object is not available by other means, the object itself would have to incorporate the necessary information to determine the object publisher, for example, with a certificate, that can be validated through the PKI. Once the certificate is authenticated, its public key can be used to authenticate the signed data object itself.4.2.2. Binding NDOs to Real-World Identities
In addition to validating NDO authenticity, it is still important to bind real-world identities, e.g., a publisher identity, to objects, so that a requestor can verify that a received object was actually published by a certain source.
With hash-based names, real-world identity bindings are not intrinsically established: the name provides the hash of the NDO or of the public key that was used to sign the NDO. There needs to be another binding to a real-world identity if that feature is requested. If the object name directly provides the publisher name and if that name is protected by a certificate that links to a PKI-like trust chain, the object name itself can provide an intrinsic binding to a real-world identity. Binding between NDOs and real-world identities is essential, but there is no universal way to achieve it as it is all intrinsic to a particular ICN approach.4.2.3. Access Control and Authorization
Access control and authorization is a challenge in ICN, because of the lack of user-to-server authentication in the fundamental communication model based on named data. All ICN entities are capable of delivering NDOs on demand due to their in-network caching function. In such an environment, traditional access control schemes based on Access Control List (ACL) are ill-suited since widely distributed ICN entities have to maintain an identical control policy over NDOs for each consumer, which is prohibited due to computational overhead and privacy issues. There are two complementary approaches to address the issues: 1. Separated approach: access control service from a third party that is independent from ICN entities. Due to the clear separation, ICN entities are free from computational overhead to determine the accessibility of NDOs by consumers; also, consumers can secure their privacy through the independent authorization entity [ACCESS-CTL-DEL]. Relevant challenges to this approach include reducing the authorization delay (when communicating to the access control provider) and currency and consistency of access control information (when access control lists are distributed). 2. Integrated approach: access control service from ICN entities. This mechanism is often based on content encryption and key distribution [ENCRYPTION-AC]. As mentioned previously, this approach suffers from prohibitive overhead for ICN entities due to the process of key verification. While key distribution is challenging per se, this approach is beneficial in a way that NDOs can be retrieved without the help of an external access control provider. Challenges to this approach include:
1. applying an access control mechanism for dynamic NDOs in in-
network caches in a timely manner;
2. providing consumers with the different levels of
accessibility to individual NDOs in a scalable manner; and
3. managing key revocation and similar PKI management functions.
4.2.4. Encryption
In ICN, NDOs can be encrypted to implement access control (only
consumers in possession of corresponding decryption keys can access
the content) or privacy (same approach). Distributing and managing
the corresponding keys as well as providing usable interfaces to
applications and human users are challenges and the subject of
ongoing work.
In principle, the challenges are similar to those of broadcast/media
distribution, and similar approaches (combing symmetric with public
key cryptography) are being investigated [NDN-CTL-SHARING].
4.2.5. Traffic Aggregation and Filtering
One request message to retrieve a data object can actually aggregate
requests coming from several consumers. This aggregation of requests
reduces the overall traffic but makes per-requestor filtering harder.
The challenge in this case is to provide a mechanism that allows
request aggregation and per-requestor filtering. A possible solution
is to indicate the set of requestors in the aggregated request such
that the response can indicate the subset of requestors allowed to
access the data object. However, this solution requires
collaboration from other nodes in the network and is not suitable for
caching. Another possible solution is to encrypt data objects and
ensure that only authorized consumers can decrypt them. This
solution does not preclude caching and does not require collaboration
from the network. However, it implies a mechanism to generate group
keys (e.g., different private keys can be used to decrypt the same
encrypted data object) [CHAUM].
4.2.6. State Overloading
ICN solutions that implement state on intermediate routers for
request routing or forwarding (e.g., Content-Centric Networking (CCN)
[CCN]) are subject to denial-of-service attacks from overloading or
superseding the internal state of a router (e.g., "interest flooding"
[BACKSCATTER]). Additionally, stateful forwarding can enable attack
vectors such as resource exhaustion or complexity attacks to the
routing infrastructure. The challenge is then to provision routers
and construct internal state in a way that alleviates sensibility to such attacks. The problem becomes even harder if the protocol does not provide information about the origin of messages. Without origin, it is a particular challenge to distinguish between regular (intense) use and misuse of the infrastructure.4.2.7. Delivering Data Objects from Replicas
A common capability of ICN solutions is data replication and in- network storage. Delivering replicated data objects from caches decouples content consumption from data sources, which leads to a loss of control on (1) content access and (2) content dissemination. In a widely distributed, decentralized environment like the Internet, this raises several challenges. One group of challenges is related to content management. Without access control, a content provider loses the means to count and survey content consumption, to limit access scopes, to control or know about the number of copies of its data in the network, or to withdraw earlier publications reliably. Any non-cooperative or desynchronized data cache may hinder an effective content management policy. Another group of challenges arises from potential traffic amplifications in the decoupled environment. ICN solutions that attempt to retrieve content from several replicas in parallel, or decorrelated network routing states, but also distributed attackers may simultaneously initiate the transmission of content from multiple replicas towards the same destination (e.g., "initiated overloads" or "blockades" [BACKSCATTER]). Methods for mitigating such threats need rigorous forwarding checks that require alignment with caching procedures (e.g., on-path or off-path).4.2.8. Cryptographic Robustness
Content producers sign their content to ensure the integrity of data and to allow for data object authentication. This is a fundamental requirement in ICN due to distributed caching. Publishers, who massively sign content, which is long-lived, offer time and data to an attacker for comprising cryptographic credentials. Signing a large amount of data eases common attacks that try to breach the key of the publisher. Based on this observation, the following research challenges emerge:
o To which extent does the content publication model conflict with
the cryptographic limitations?
o How can we achieve transparent re-signing without introducing
additional cryptographic weaknesses or key management overhead?
In general, ICN implementations should be designed considering the
guidelines provided by [RFC7696], especially regarding cryptographic
algorithm agility, for example, [RFC6920] specifies a naming scheme
for hash-based names that was designed to support algorithm agility.
4.2.9. Routing and Forwarding Information Bases
In information-centric networks, one attack vector is to increase the
size of routing and forwarding information bases at ICN nodes, i.e.,
attacking routing scalability in networks that rely on routing by
name. This is an intrinsic ICN security issue: possible mitigation
approaches include combining routing information authenticity
validation with filtering (e.g., maximum de-aggregation level
whenever applicable, blacklists, etc.,).
4.3. Routing and Resolution System Scalability
ICN routing is a process that finds an NDO based on its name
initially provided by a requestor. ICN routing may comprise three
steps: (1) name resolution, (2) discovery, and (3) delivery. The
name resolution step translates the name of the requested NDO into
its locator. The discovery step routes the request to the data
object based on its name or locator. The last step (delivery) routes
the data object back to the requestor. Depending on how these steps
are combined, ICN routing schemes can be categorized as Route-By-Name
Routing (RBNR), Lookup-By-Name Routing (LBNR), and Hybrid Routing
(HR) as discussed in the following subsections.
4.3.1. Route-By-Name Routing
RBNR omits the first name resolution step as the name of the NDO is
directly used to route the request to the data object. Therefore,
routing information for each data object has to be maintained in the
routing table. Since the number of data objects is very large
(estimated as 10^11 back in 2007 [DONA], but this may be
significantly larger than that, e.g., 10^15 to 10^22), the size of
routing tables becomes a concern, as it can be proportional to the
number of data objects unless an aggregation mechanism is introduced.
On the other hand, RBNR reduces overall latency and simplifies the
routing process due to the omission of the resolution process. For
the delivery step, RBNR needs another identifier (ID) of either host
or location to forward the requested data object back to the
requestor. Otherwise, an additional routing mechanism has to be introduced, such as breadcrumbs routing [BREADCRUMBS], in which each request leaves behind a trail of breadcrumbs along its forwarding path, and then the response is forwarded back to the requestor consuming the trail. Challenges specific to RBNR include: o How can we aggregate the names of data objects to reduce the number of routing entries? o How does a user learn the name that is designed for aggregation by the provider? For example, although we name our contribution as "ICN research challenges", the IRTF (provider) may want to change the name to "/IETF/IRTF/ICN/Research challenges" for aggregation. In this case, how does a user learn the name "/IETF/IRTF/ICN/ Research challenges" to retrieve the contribution initially named "ICN research challenges" without any resolution process? o Without introducing the name aggregation scheme, can we still achieve scalable routing by taking advantage of topological structure and distributed copies? For example, would employing compact routing [COMPACT], random walk [RANDOM], or greedy routing [GREEDY] work at the Internet scale? o How can we incorporate copies of a data object in in-network caches in this routing scheme? o Breadcrumbs routing implies a symmetric path for ICN request and response delivery. Some network configurations and link types prohibit symmetric path forwarding, so it would be challenging to interconnect such networks to an infrastructure based on breadcrumbs routing. For example, certain forwarding strategies in Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) [RFC4838] are employing opportunistic forwarding where responses cannot be assumed to travel the same path as requests.4.3.2. Lookup-By-Name Routing
LBNR uses the first name resolution step to translate the name of the requesting data object into its locator. Then, the second discovery step is carried out based on the locator. Since IP addresses could be used as locators, the discovery step can depend on the current IP infrastructure. The delivery step can be implemented similarly to IP routing. The locator of the requestor is included in the request message, and then the requested data object is delivered to the requestor based on the locator. An instantiation of LBNR is [MDHT].
Challenges specific to LBNR include:
o How can we build a scalable resolution system that provides:
* Fast lookup: Mapping the name of a data object to its locators
(copies as well).
* Fast update: The location of a data object is expected to
change frequently. Also, multiple data objects may change
their locations at the same time, e.g., data objects in a
laptop.
o How can we incorporate copies of a data object in in-network
caches in this routing scheme?
4.3.3. Hybrid Routing
HR combines RBNR and LBNR to benefit from their advantages. Within a
single administrative domain, e.g., an ISP, where scalability issues
can be addressed with network planning, RBNR can be adopted to reduce
overall latency by omitting the resolution process. On the other
hand, LBNR can be used to route between domains that have their own
prefix (locator).
For instance, a request message initially includes the name of the
NDO for the operation of RBNR and is forwarded to a cached copy of
the NDO or the original server. When the request message fails to
find a routing entry in the router, a name resolution step kicks in
to translate the name into its locator before forwarding the request
message based on the retrieved locator.
Challenges specific to HR are:
o How can we design a scalable mapping system that, given the name
of the NDO, should return a destination domain locator so that a
user request can be encapsulated and forwarded to the domain?
o How can the mapping information be secured to prevent a malicious
router from hijacking the request message by chaining its locator?
o How can the bind between the name and the content of the NDO be
maintained for the verification of its origin and integrity when
the name changes due to the retrieved locator?
(next page on part 2)