On the Efcacy of Content-Centric Networking Applied to Internet-based MANETs

Bryce Thomas
James Cook University

Raja Jurdak
CSIRO

Ian Atkinson
James Cook University

bryce.m.thomas@gmail.com raja.jurdak@csiro.au

ian.atkinson@jcu.edu.au

ABSTRACT
Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an architecture which treats chunks of named content as the primary network abstraction rather than host addresses. CCN is designed to make content dissemination more efcient by allowing content to be cached at and retrieved from any device in the network, including typically terminal nodes such as mobile phones and laptops. CCN may therefore be an effective way to reduce the ever-increasing load on xed wireless networking infrastructure by enabling popular Internet-originating content to percolate directly between end-user devices, i.e., an Internet-based Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET). The efcacy of such a scheme is limited in large part by the level of content homogeneity and mobility patterns within the MANET. In a step towards understanding the efcacy of CCN in Internet-based MANETs, we seek to perform tracedriven simulations of content dissemination among Wi-Fi devices in a large university campus setting.

2.

SIMULATION OVERVIEW

In order to simulate CCN as applied to an Internetbased MANET we employ two key traces: i) a timestamped list of encounters describing when any two wireless devices come into and leave transmission range of one another and ii) a timestamped list of content received by devices from the infrastructure. Given these traces we seek to simulate CCN-based content sharing under a further set of parameterized constraints, i.e., available bandwidth, routing strategy, cache size, etcetera. The desired result of our simulation is a percentage gure indicating what portion of all downloaded content could have been acquired through the MANET rather than relying on the infrastructure.

3.

IMPLEMENTATION

In this section we describe our simulation method in the context of Wi-Fi mobility and data traces.

1.

INTRODUCTION

3.1

Dataset

There is currently much interest in the research community around Content-centric Networking [2](CCN) as a potential Future Internet architecture. CCN uses packet-sized chunks of named content as the Layer 3 network primitive, rather than host addresses. CCN intends to make networks more ecient by allowing these chunks of content to be cached at and retrieved from any node in the network, including end-user devices. Our contribution is to evaluate the ecacy of CCN for one specic purpose: reducing the load on wireless networking infrastructure. The proliferation of Internet-enabled mobile devices and the seemingly insatiable demand of these devices for faster and more voluminous data places a perennial strain on wireless infrastructure. CCN as applied to an Internet-based MANET may provide a solution to this problem by enabling duplicate content to be shared directly between co-located peer devices. By using realworld packet and mobility traces to model cases where Internet-originating content could have been shared via MANET, we seek to gauge the ecacy of CCN in reducing load on wireless infrastructure. 1

We are collecting mobility and data traces describing the activity of all 802.11 devices using the James Cook University (JCU) Wi-Fi network. The mobility trace describes when a particular device connects to and disconnects from one of the approximately 500 Access Points (APs) on campus. We approximate an encounter between devices A and B to occur whenever A and B are concurrently connected to the same AP. The data trace is a .pcap packet capture of all trac sent to Wi-Fi devices via campus APs. This capture encapsulates all of the content devices are currently retrieving from the infrastructure.

3.2

Trace Preprocessing

The .pcap data trace is a full Layer 2 packet capture. To simulate content dissemination in a protocolindependent manner, we strip each layers protocol headers leaving only the application content. This is a relatively straight-forward process at the highly standardized lower layers of the network stack. Stripping application layer headers is somewhat more complex as there

time t1 <d, d, t3, [t1, t2]> Fingerprint Store Content Store

< a, b, t3, [t1, t2]>

f c

t2

t3 Exchange Record d

t4 f t5 c

...

Content Store Exchange Record

Figure 2: d receives relevant and timely content from d . is being received), tsr is the timestamp of when cr receives the content and coi is a time interval describing the period of co s content cr receives. Step 3: Finally, we synthesize the data structures assembled in Steps 1 and 2 to identify those instances where a device could have received a portion c of its requested content from the MANET, eliminating the need to resort to the infrastructure. We identify two criteria for device d to receive content c associated with ngerprint f from device d in time to eliminate the need for d to retrieve c from the infrastructure: i) d must have access to content from d with an interval that encapsulates the interval of f s appearance in d ii) this access must come at a time prior to when d would normally download c from the infrastructure (Figure 2). The ngerprint store provides us with a list of devices in which f occurs and at what times. The exchange record tells us which of these devices received content from one or more of the other devices and whether any of this content came from an interval encapsulating when f occurred. The exchange record and ngerprint store combined therefore determine whether d receives usable content from d . Where it is determined that d receives usable content from d , we dereference the two ngerprint pointers into the content store and expand the match region left and right until either a non-matching byte is encountered or d s interval is no longer encapsulated inside the interval of content available at d. We then ag this region of d as a portion of content that may have feasibly been retrieved from the MANET.

Figure 1: Simulation data structures. are many application layer protocols in use, each with dierent parsing rules. To keep our analysis tractable, we select a small subset of all application layer protocols like HTTP which account for a large percentage of trac and for which reliable and accurate parsers exist.

3.3

Simulation Sketch

In this section we sketch a proposed three step method of execution for simulating CCN dissemination in Internetbased MANETs. Our method requires random access to large quantities of data and is intended to be run on a large cluster. However, due to space limitations, we describe our approach as though executed on a single machine. Step 1: We rst create i) a content store listing the application layer content downloaded by each device over the duration of the trace and ii) a ngerprint store used for identifying duplicate content across devices (Figure 1). The content store contains for each device a binary encoded, chronologically ordered bit stream of timestamped content, where timestamps are derived from the .pcap trace le. Our ngerprint store is inspired by the work of Anand et al.[1] on redundant trac elimination and uses a sliding hash function known as a Rabin ngerprint [3] to calculate a set of representative ngerprints over n -byte substrings of a devices downloaded content. Each ngerprint in the ngerprint store maintains a list of pointers into the content store creating a mapping between ngerprints and the times at which they appear in specic devices downloaded content. Step 2: We then create a single data structure, the exchange record, which stores for each device a record of what other devices content was received at what time. This data structure is built by performing a discrete event simulation of device encounters and the respective content transfer under the parameterized constraints. Rather than storing actual exchanged content in the exchange record, we store a list of four-tuples of the form <cr, co, tsr, coi>. cr is the id of the device receiving the content, co is the id of the device at which the content originated (not the device from which the content 2

4.

CONCLUSION

By simulating CCN content dissemination in an Internetbased MANET using real packet and mobility traces, we hope to inform the discussion on whether CCN combined with MANET is a viable strategy for reducing load on wireless infrastructure. While our own analysis is limited to a campus environment, our conceptual framework allows others to perform comparable analyses in other environments.

5.

REFERENCES

[1] A. Anand, A. Gupta, A. Akella, S. Seshan, and S. Shenker. Packet caches on routers: the implications of universal redundant trac elimination. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., 38(4):219230, Aug. 2008. [2] V. Jacobson, D. K. Smetters, J. D. Thornton, M. F. Plass, N. H. Briggs, and R. L. Braynard. Networking named content. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies, CoNEXT 09, pages 112, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM. [3] M. O. Rabin. Fingerprinting by random polynomials. Technical Report TR-15-81, Harvard University, 1987.