Poster: Load and Bandwidth aware Forwarding in Information-Centric Networks

Real-time healthcare applications demand stringent communication resources to meet the QoS requirements. To meet the application resource demands, this poster proposes a Load and Bandwidth aware Forwarding strategy (LBF-ICN) in Information-Centric Networks (ICN). The LBF-ICN considers router interfaces' pending entries and available bandwidth resources in order to select the next hop for interest forwarding. The LBF-ICN strategy aims to distribute the network load along with bandwidth allocation in interest forwarding.


INTRODUCTION
The advancement in applications is a shift towards content-centric communication rather than conventional sources and destinationcentric approach [3].However, the existing TCP/IP Internet architecture relies on source and destination-based communication.Therefore, to meet the applications' content-centric demands and to address the limitations of TCP/IP such as address and location-based communication, a new named-based communication architecture named Information-Centric Networking (ICN) [2] has emerged.
In ICN, applications transmit packets containing the name of the desired data, and any node within the network possessing the requested data can respond with the corresponding data packet.Moreover, ICN has a unique feature of forwarding that the routers can select the next hop relying on forwarding strategies.However, the existing ICN strategies such as Best Route (BR) and multicast overlook the crucial metrics such as interfaces' load and bandwidth resources in forwarding.To address these shortcomings, we propose a load and bandwidth-aware forwarding strategy named: LBF-ICN strategy.The contributions of the poster are, (i) We propose a new LBF-ICN forwarding strategy that chooses the appropriate next hop based on the interface load and available bandwidth resources for interest forwarding, (ii) to rank the interfaces, the LBF-ICN maintains the WPM value in FIB, which is computed from interfaces' pending entries and bandwidth resources using the Weighted Product Model (WPM).

LBF-ICN FORWARDING STRATEGY
The proposed LBF-ICN strategy considers the interfaces' pending entries and bandwidth for forwarding the interest and timely delivery of the requested data.In this regard, we have utilized the WPM model for the calculation of interface ranking (elaborated in the subsequent section).Upon receiving interest at router R1, as depicted in Figure 1, the interest is forwarded to R4 by following the maximum WPM value against the namespace.The WPM value is computed by the WPM model considering the interfaces' pending entries along with the available bandwidth.

Weighted Product Model (WPM) based Interface Classification
Each ICN router maintains a WPM value in its FIB, computed by the factors including pending entries along with the available bandwidth of interfaces.The interface with fewer pending entries and higher bandwidth is considered the best for interest forwarding and subsequent data retrieval.At first, WPM performs normalization of pending entries and the available bandwidth of interfaces.Subsequently, the weights are multiplied by the pending entries and bandwidth resources 1 .Following this, the WPM multiplication is performed with the weighted results in order to rank the interfaces.Once interfaces are classified, the interests are forwarded by considering the maximum WPM value by utilizing the algorithm 1. Algorithm 1, upon receiving interests, it retrieves all potential interfaces along with bandwidth and loops through the interfaces to identify pending entries and available bandwidth.Next, normalization is performed followed by the multiplication of weights.Thereafter, the WPM multiplication is performed and interfaces are ranked for forwarding.

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
To evaluate the LBF-ICN in comparison with the BR, we have utilized ndnSIM [1], simulator. 1In this research, we have considered equal weightage for pending entries and bandwidth resources.

CONCLUSION
In this poster, we proposed an LBF-ICN forwarding strategy that forwards the interests based on the ICN router interfaces' pending entries and their available bandwidth.The interfaces are ranked by employing the WPM model taking into account interfaces' pending entries and bandwidth resources.The simulation results show that the LBF-ICN outperforms the BR in the load distribution and bandwidth allocation in interest forwarding.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: LBF-ICN interest and data forwarding process

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Interest forwarding on the routes as a function of interest frequency