Name Resolution Information Distribution in NetInf

Abstract: Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a different architecture from today's Internet, which is host-centric. In ICN, content is requested by the names of content objects instead of network or host addresses. This feature allows for a number of advantages, such as in-network caching and request aggregation. Network of Information (NetInf) is an ICN architecture. It is an overlay on TCP/IP, which translates content object names to locators or IP addresses. NetInf is designed to facilitate initial deployment and migration from today's networks to ICN. In an ICN network, content can be cached at numerous locations giving a client the possibility to retrieve content from a number of available sources. In order to retrieve a content object, a client does a lookup in a Name Resolution Service (NRS) to resolve the content name into a set of locators where the content is stored. By distributing the location information of content objects from the NRS to NetInf nodes in the network the lookup time and overhead caused by the lookup messages can be reduced. Hence resulting in better end-user experience and more efficient network utilization. In this thesis, two methods to distribute location information of content objects in a NetInf network have been proposed and evaluated against a reference model where the location information is hosted centrally in an NRS. The effectiveness of the proposed methods has been evaluated by running simulations on a NetInf simulator (built on OMNeT++) that was built during the course of this project. Evaluation results show that the proposed methods reduce the lookup/name resolution latency of content objects. The results also compare the overhead caused by each one of the proposed methods in terms of network utilization. We also show the results that the network topology has an impact on the effectiveness of the proposed methods and therefore is a factor that needs due consideration in deciding which method is suitable when.