The Design of the Future Internet Architecture

Abstract

With the exponential increase of Internet users, mobility, and bandwidth-hungry Internet applications, current Internet architecture has shown its limitation. Several future Internet architectures have been proposed in recent years, trying to improve the classical Internet from various perspectives. For example, Information-Centric Network (ICN), e.g., NDN (Named Data Network), aims to address the weaknesses of current host-based and point-to-point communication architecture by directly naming the content and obtaining content by content name; The MobilityFirst project focuses on the full support of mobility by separating the naming and addressing through Globally Unique IDentifier (GUID) and Network Address (NA); PURSUIT Project introduces a publish-subscribe based internetworking architecture by using the Forwarding ID (FID) to identify content packets. It also supports delivering content to multiple clients simultaneously.

Each of the aforementioned architectures has addressed some issues of the current Internet architecture. We foresee that some features of such architectures may co-exist in the future Internet architecture, which will bring interoperability issue to handle among several Internet architectures. On the other hand, an important feature of all aforementioned architectures is to utilize in-network cache to speed up information retrieval, which will introduce security issue. Meanwhile, with the introduction of in-network storage and computation power, future Internet will not simply be communication infrastructure. How to provide convenient data access by leverage in-network storage will be very important. This thesis mainly focuses on interoperability and data access through in-network storage and in-network cache.

For interoperability, we propose two implementation schemes, SD-ICN and Generic Name Resolution. The first one is to inter-operate different ICN architectures through a software-defined ICN (SD-ICN) framework. Different ICN architectures have common modules, such as naming, data caching and routing. We abstract and implement such common functions in the control plane and adapt the packet to corresponding ICN schemes in the forwarding plane, which realizes the coexistence and interoperability among different ICN schemes.

To address the inter-operability among different future Internet architectures, which could be beyond ICN architectures, we propose a generic name resolution systems. By examining most representative network protocols, we can find that all protocols are specified by their supporting namespaces and corresponding resolution policies from one namespace to others. A generic name resolution system is proposed to enable new protocol definition and protocol translation, thus inter-operability can be achieved.

In-network storage will enable users not only to access their data quicker than that from end storage system such as Dropbox, but also to be independent from application providers such as Dropbox, Tencent, and Google. An in-network storage system needs to provide the application independent data accessing interface and support the interoperability among different types of applications. To this end, AI3, which decouples the user's data from the service provider by unified interfaces and grouped application-independent atomic operations, is developed. As the verification, We present a prototype of AI3, which shows the features of AI3 from four parts: 1) ASP-independent data management; 2) ASP-independent management of users' social relations; 3) inter-domain data transport and user roaming; 4) real-time communications.

In-network caching is an important feature for future Internet. Considering the digital right management and privacy issue, we propose and implement a novel scheme for secure and efficient encrypted in-network content caching and delivery. We design an encrypted video fingerprint index to empower the network with a fully controlled capability of locating the cached encrypted chunks for given encrypted requests and then present a secure redundancy elimination protocol to enable fast video delivery via leveraging cached encrypted chunks.

In summary, in this thesis, we consider the future internet architecture from the interoperability, name resolution, data accessing and in-network content privacy. We propose some schemes to address the problems respectively and we present the prototype frameworks and demonstrations. Our schemes solve problems in current networked systems and indicate the direction for the evolution of Future Internet Architecture.

Date of Award	23 Jan 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Jianping WANG (Supervisor)