Information-Centric Networking Research Group Update December 2021
The Information-Centric Networking Research Group (ICNRG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) has recently published two RFC and held a research meeting on December 10th 2021.
Recent RFC Publications
ICNRG published two RFCs recently:
RFC 9139: ICN Adaptation to Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LoWPANs)
RFC 9139 defines a convergence layer for Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) and Named Data Networking (NDN) over IEEE 802.15.4 Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LoWPANs). A new frame format is specified to adapt CCNx and NDN packets to the small MTU size of IEEE 802.15.4. For that, syntactic and semantic changes to the TLV-based header formats are described.
To support compatibility with other LoWPAN technologies that may coexist on a wireless medium, the dispatching scheme provided by IPv6 over LoWPAN (6LoWPAN) is extended to include new dispatch types for CCNx and NDN. Additionally, the fragmentation component of the 6LoWPAN dispatching framework is applied to Information-Centric Network (ICN) chunks.
In its second part, the document defines stateless and stateful compression schemes to improve efficiency on constrained links. Stateless compression reduces TLV expressions to static header fields for common use cases. Stateful compression schemes elide states local to the LoWPAN and replace names in Data packets by short local identifiers.
The ICN LoWPAN specification is a great platform for future experiments with ICN in constrained networking environments, including but not limited to LoWPAN networks.
RFC 9138: Design Considerations for Name Resolution Service in Information-Centric Networking (ICN)
RFC 9138 provides the functionalities and design considerations for a Name Resolution Service (NRS) in Information-Centric Networking (ICN). The purpose of an NRS in ICN is to translate an object name into some other information such as a locator, another name, etc. in order to forward the object request.
Since naming data independently from its current location (where it is stored) is a primary concept of ICN, how to find any NDO using a location-independent name is one of the most important design challenges in ICN. Such ICN routing may comprise three steps:
- Name resolution: matches/translates a content name to the locator of the content producer or source that can provide the content.
- Content request routing: routes the content request towards the content's location based either on its name or locator.
- Content delivery: transfers the content to the requester.
Among the three steps of ICN routing, this document investigates only the name resolution step, which translates a content name to the content locator. In addition, this document covers various possible types of name resolution in ICN such as one name to another name, name to locator, name to manifest, name to metadata, etc.
ICNRG Meeting on December 10th 2021
Agenda
| 1 | Chairs’ Presentation: Status, Updates | Chairs | 05 min |
| 2 | Zenoh - The Edge Data Fabric | Carlos Guimarães | 30 min |
| 3 | The SPAN Network Architecture | Rhett Sampson | 30 min |
| 4 | NDNts API Design | Junxiao Shi | 30 min |
| 6 | Wrap-Up, Next Steps | Chairs | 5 min |
Zenoh
- Carlos Guimarães
- Presentation
- Video Recording
Carlos Guimarães presented zenoh – The Edge Data Fabric. zenoh is an ICN-inspired data distribution and processing system that zenoh aims at unifying data in motion, data at rest and computations. It blends traditional pub/sub with geo distributed storage, queries and computations, adopting a hierarchical naming scheme and other ICN properties. zenoh provides a high level API for high performance pub/sub and distributed queries, data representation transcoding, an implementation of geo-distributed storage and distributed computed values.
SPAN Network Architecture
- Rhett Sampson and Jaime Lorca
- Presentation
- Video Recording
Rhett Sampson and Jaime Llorca presented GT Systems' SPAN-AI content distribution system (CDN as a service) that uses ICN/CCN/NDN for the implementation of their distributed content delivery system, leveraging name-based routing.
NDNts API Design
- Junxiao Shi
- Presentation
- Video Recording
Junxiao Shi presented the NDNts API Design. NDNts is an NDN implementation in TypeScript, aiming to facilitate NDN application development in browsers and on the Node.js platform.
The development of NDNts led to some insights on NDN low-level API design (packet decoding, fragmentation, notion of "faces", retransmission logic etc.) that Junxiao shared in his presentation.