Information retention for disaster-stricken networks using Content Centric Networking

Abstract: The underlying architecture of the Internet has been mostly the same since its beginning in the 1960s and the TCP/IP protocol stack remains ubiquitous. However the Internet is today used for much wider purposes than what was originally intended and now the most common use of the Internet is for the distribution of various forms of content. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is an alternative architecture responding to this change in usage, intended to be more prepared to handle the new requirements of the Internet not only today but also in the future. The primary concern in ICN is the secure and efficient distribution of content. Current ICN research often concerns applications on various disaster scenarios as it is believed that ICN has properties that match the requirements of such scenarios. In this thesis that research is continued by developing an especially designed information retention solution, using the existing ICN implementation of Content Centric Networking (CCN). The aim is to maximisise and prolong the availability of as much content as possible in disaster-stricken networks by preemptively replicating content across the network topology. The solution is then evaluated against a scenario set in a network topology consisting of virtual machines. The final result is that the solution performs satisfactorily and thus demonstrate the potential of ICN when applied to such scenarios.