A reliable adaptive forwarding approach in named data networking

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Abstract

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new paradigm for the future Internet infrastructure based on routable named data. The NDN infrastructure consists of a new component called strategy layer. The strategy layer allows for dynamically selecting network interfaces taking into account network conditions such as delay to forward Interest messages toward a provider. However, defining proper criteria for selecting the best possible paths to forward Interest messages is challenging in this network because different parameters and conditions conflict one another when choosing the best interfaces. Moreover, in NDN, data can be retrieved from different sources. However, to the best of our knowledge, the previous forwarding strategy methods that can estimate from which path the valid data can be fetched have not considered an attacker who tries to inject fake data with the same name as valid data. Therefore, in this paper, we take a holistic, adaptive forwarding approach that takes into account various metrics: bandwidth, load, delay, and reliability. Especially, we propose a reliability metric that defines which path is more stable and reliable to retrieve legitimate data. Our evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method enables reliable message delivery against potential attackers that inject invalid data, in addition, our method introduces marginal delay compared with the conventional forwarding methods in NDN.

Introduction

Due to the drastic increasing number of Internet users, the current IP based infrastructure exposes limitations such as the usage of bandwidth, performance of the network and security, and original server load. From users’ perspective, the importance of data itself holds higher priority than the location it is fetched from; however, the current IP-based infrastructure is based on the end host IP address (location of data). Due to this incompatibility, the issues such as availability, security, and location dependency affect users and network performance. Therefore, these limitations and incompatibility have motivated researchers to explore a new replacement for the current Internet infrastructure. Named Data Networking (NDN), which is an instantiation of Information-Centric Network (ICN), uses independent location data name, in-network caching, and data-based security (instead of channel-based security) to retrieve content from nearby a requester. Therefore, NDN which is based on content-centric communication rather than host-centric communication is a good candidate to be implemented in the future Internet infrastructure [1], [2]. Moreover, some works such as [3] show that using an application name directly in the network layer can improve efficient data dissemination. In NDN, data is distributed by pervasive caching to enhance responding time and load balancing in the network [4], [5], [6], [7], [8].

To route a message, both a routing protocol and a forwarding strategy should be considered. The main difference between routing protocols and forwarding strategies is that routing protocols clarify which routes can meet a request while forwarding approaches can reveal the benefits and the order of the routes [9]. In NDN, the routing protocol acts the same as IP networks while the forwarding strategy can update adaptively to refine the network problem quickly [10]. Furthermore, because of NDN features such as multihoming and ubiquitous caching, hop by hop forwarding control is more appropriate than that conventional end to end congestion control. This is due to the fact that data can be fetched from different distances and sources, so forwarding control should be applied on each node rather than an end node. Therefore, according to network conditions and requirements, which can have contradict with each other, the forwarding strategy should define an appropriate route(s) among available paths in each node to improve network performance [2].

In this work, we concentrate on the forwarding strategy, and we assume that a router contains all available paths for every content (data), so the proposed reliable adaptive forwarding approach selects the best path among the available routes to forward an Interest message toward a given content.

Although there are some forwarding strategy methods proposed for NDN [2], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], to the best of our knowledge, none of them considers an attacker, which injects fake data with the same name as valid data, to select a proper forwarding path for an Interest messages toward the source. However, in this paper, the proposed method defines a new parameter named as the reliability metric which is a combination of three parameters: popularity of the content message, credibility of the peer, and negative feedback. Popularity is proportional to the number of requests that a router receives for a given content. The credibility of the peer is calculated based on the trust value of the contents that the peer has sent to a router. In other words, the router based on the proposed method calculates the trust value of each content that a peer sends. Therefore, the router will calculate the credibility of that peer based on the trust value of contents that this peer has sent to the router. Negative feedback is proportional to a number of the negative users’ responses that a router receives for a given content. Therefore, the proposed method takes into account the reliability metric to estimate from where valid data can be fetched, and also the other metrics, namely, load balancing, bandwidth, and delay are computed to select the best interface to forward an Interest message toward the source of corresponding data. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated by means of the NS-3 simulator, and simulation results prove that the proposed reliable adaptive forwarding method can act better than conventional forwarding methods in counteracting the attacker’s injection of fake contents. The main contributions of this paper are summarized as follows:

  • 1.

    Applying a new parameter called reliability in the forwarding strategy.

  • 2.

    Defining a trust method to evaluate validity of data and calculate the reliability parameter.

  • 3.

    Using a metric which is combination of different network parameters: delay, bandwidth, load balancing and reliability to rank each interface for the specific prefix.

  • 4.

    Evaluation of the proposed method against the attacker’s injected invalid data to the network, and the improvement over the previous technique in retrieving valid data.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: the forwarding strategies in NDN which contains NDN overview and related work will be explained in Section 2. In Section 3, the system model and problem statement are presented followed by the description of the proposed method in Section 4. Evaluation of the proposed method and simulation results are presented in Section 5. Finally, some conclusions and future work are outlined in Section 6.

Section snippets

Forwarding strategy in NDN

In this section, first we explain the NDN infrastructure briefly with emphasizing how routing and forwarding work in NDN, and then we discuss related work regarding forwarding strategies in this network.

System design overview

In general, our system includes three entities: user, router, and provider. When a user sends a request by transferring an Interest message to the network, the Data message can be retrieved from any node (router) if it is available in its cache. Otherwise, the router forwards the Interest message toward the provider. The proposed forwarding algorithm is implemented in the intervening routers to forward an Interest message toward the proper provider with considering network conditions.

As we

Proposed method

As aforementioned, an exemplary forwarding strategy defines the best interface to forward an Interest message toward a corresponding provider. Therefore, we propose a new ranking method to select a proper interface for forwarding the Interest message toward the valid provider. We prefer to use the Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) metric than the NLSR protocol for the reason that NLSR defines only one parameter which is cost of reaching a destination to rank each interface for

Evaluation

In this section, we evaluate the performance of the proposed methods through simulations.

Conclusion and future work

In spite of the IP network, the forwarding strategy in NDN can update adaptively to enhance the network performance. The router uses a forwarding strategy to select a proper interface to forward Interest messages; however, applying a suitable metric to select the best interface is challenging. Therefore, in this paper, we have presented a new forwarding approach that uses a new metric called reliability, which includes popularity of content (data), negative feedback, and credibility of peers,

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No.2018-0-00269, A research on safe and convenient big data processing methods). This work was also supported by the MSIT (Ministry of Science and ICT), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program (IITP-2018-2014-1-00636) supervised by the IITP (Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion).

Zeinab Rezaeifar received her B.S. in Communication Engineering, from Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Iran in 2008 and M.S. degree in Network Communication Engineering, from Isfahan University of Technology, Iran in 2012. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Hanyang University, South Korea in 2018. Currently she is doing postdoctoral in Computer Science and Engineering department from Korea University. Her main research interests include security issues in

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  • Cited by (0)

    Zeinab Rezaeifar received her B.S. in Communication Engineering, from Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Iran in 2008 and M.S. degree in Network Communication Engineering, from Isfahan University of Technology, Iran in 2012. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Hanyang University, South Korea in 2018. Currently she is doing postdoctoral in Computer Science and Engineering department from Korea University. Her main research interests include security issues in wireless charging of Electric Vehicle (EV), routing in VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks), information security and privacy issues in VANET, DTN (Delay Tolerant Network) in VANET, and security issues in Content Centric Networks (CCN).

    Jian Wang, received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Jilin University, respectively in 2004, 2007, and 2011. He is interested in topics related to wireless communication and vehicular networks, especially for network security and communication modeling. He has published over 40 articles on international journals and conferences. Currently he is a professor in Jilin University, China.

    Heekuck Oh received his B.Sc. in Electronics Engineering from Hanyang University in 1983. He received his M.S and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from Iowa State University in 1989 and 1992, respectively. In 1994, he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hanyang University, Erica campus, where he is currently a professor. His current research interests include network and system security. Prof. Oh is President Emeritus of Korea Institute of Information Security and Cryptography, and is a member of Advisory Committee for Digital Investigation in Supreme Prosecutors’ Office of the Republic of Korea. He is also member of Advisory Committee on Government Policy under Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs.

    Suk-Bok Lee received his B.Sc. and M.S. in Computer Engineering from Hong-Ik University in 2004 and 2006 respectively. He received his Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from University of California in 2011. In 2012, he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hanyang University, Erica campus, where he is currently an assistant professor. His current research interests include computer networks, mobile systems, wireless networking, and network security.

    Junbeom Hur received the B.S. degree from Korea University, Seoul, South Korea, in 2001, and the M.S and Ph.D. degrees from KAIST in 2005 and 2009, respectively, in computer science. He was with the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign as a postdoctoral researcher from 2009 to 2011 and the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chung-Ang University, South Korea, as an assistant professor from 2011 to 2015. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University, South Korea. His research interests include information security, cloud computing security, mobile security, and applied cryptography.

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