NDNWiFi: Named Data Networking Enabled WiFi in Challenged Communication Environments

摘要

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a promising future Internet architecture that can potentially address the limitations of existing IP networks and offer a number of advantages such as scalable name-based routing, data-centric security and seamless mobility support. Thanks to the features such as in-network caching, sessionless communications and hop-by-hop forwarding, NDN can significantly reduce the content retrieval time, as well as providing a reliable and delay-tolerant network service in a challenged communication environment. In this paper, we prototype NDN enabled WiFi (NDNWiFi) to provide cost-efficient Internet service for large outdoor areas, such as U.S. national parks, which are usually not covered by traditional Internet services. Our contributions include the prototyping of a fine-grained and flexible "data mule" by using Andriod phones with extended forwarding features and capabilities, enabling NDNWiFi to efficiently deliver information in a scenario where the wireless signal is unreliable and intermittent. In particular, we propose a selective broadcast based forwarding strategy, called hit-aware-multicast, which can make the forwarding decision based on historical hit rate information. We conduct a set of experiments on a physical testbed to evaluate the performance of the proposed forwarding strategy and find out that hit-aware-multicast can well balance the tradeoff between network resource consumption and content retrieval time.