Enhancing Information Resilience in Disruptive Information-Centric Networks

We argue that data communications in dynamic and potentially fragmented networks should not and cannot rely on network-centric resilience schemes, as is the case in today’s networks, but should take advantage of techniques that focus on information-centric resilience. We make the case that management and control in disruptive environments should take advantage of information-centricity, rather than focus on node-oriented path recovery routing. This is also essential in the information-centric networking (ICN) paradigm, which is by nature oblivious to network locations. In this context, we build on ICN and enhance the named data networking (NDN) architecture with extra functionality in order to make it resilient to network failures. We introduce an extra interest management routing table, which we call the “satisfied interest table” (SIT) and which points to the direction of already satisfied interests. This way, upon failure of links/nodes toward the content origin, the SIT table can redirect interests toward caches and end-users that have recently received the requested content. Our extensive performance evaluation shows that our simple, yet efficient information resilience scheme can serve most requests made after disruptive effects, e.g., natural disasters, where users are interested in latest updates, dissemination of warnings from first responders and evacuation plans. More generally, we believe that our proposed approach should become part of the main NDN architecture as it can support service resilience in the case of network failures.