Workshop: A Brief History of Information-Centric Networks (2019.07.31)

[yiannisbot]

Workshop: A Brief History of Information-Centric Networks

Date/Time: Wednesday 31st July at 5pm UTC

In parallel to the great effort being put into the IPFS and libp2p projects, there has been a parallel stream of work mainly driven by the academic and research community to shift the focus from host-based networking to content- or information-centric networking (CCN/ICN). Most of the work has been kicked off around 2006, mainly from Van Jacobson (at Xerox PARC at the time) and in the form of talks - see [1] for a pretty inspiring talk by Van Jacobson. This later materialised in several papers and is today still going on under the umbrella of the Named-Data Networking project (see below).

A number of projects have since emerged (mainly in the US and Europe) to investigate the properties of a content-centric network, where content itself is the addressable and routable primitive and to build a scalable, efficient and secure Future Internet Architecture. The work has (mostly) assumed that this future Internet architecture will build on top of IP and will involve in-network routing and forwarding entities (i.e., network routers), which will be able to “talk” ICN language.

In this workshop, we will start off with a general introduction to the properties and differences of name-based routing and name-resolution-based routing in Information-Centric Networks, as well as the strength of applying application-level semantics into network-layer names. We will go through some of the most prominent architectural proposals, which are also conceptually close to IPFS and libp2p. The purpose of this interactive workshop will be to:

— Identify interesting aspects or features of previously proposed architectures that are worth looking into closer.

— Identify (both for the short term and for the long term) what are the desired features and the overall architectural structure of IPFS and what does that mean for libp2p.

— Assuming those changes take place in the near future in IPFS and libp2p, what are the expected performance benefits and what are the potential risks.

Below is a brief description of the architectures that will be discussed together with pointers to reading material. The overall length of the workshop is estimated to be 2hrs. Each of the sessions (the three below plus the introduction) will be ~20mins each allowing 10mins for discussion and Q&A in each session).

1) NDN: Named Data Networking

NDN is a US-driven project, which however is attracting attention worldwide. NDN follows a “name-based routing” approach, where names are hierarchical and routers do longest-prefix matching to find the next node to forward the request to. This is the most radical of the ICN architectures, which assumes that routers in the network (or at least some of them) understand the NDN stack and support in-network content caching. Although it comes with several challenges (e.g., scaling the routing table size), its expected benefits are significant, being able to natively support client mobility, in-network caching and multicast.

Material:

• Website (includes a ton of material): named-data.net

• Original 2009 paper: https://named-data.net/publications/networkingnamedcontent/

• Follow up 2014 paper: https://named-data.net/publications/named_data_networking_ccr/

2) DONA: Data-Oriented (and beyond) Network Architecture

DONA is a 2007 ACM SIGCOMM paper, which advocates a hierarchical data resolution structure, where there is at least one “resolution handler” in each ISP domain. Names are structured according to the form P:L, where P is the cryptographic hash of the principal’s (publisher’s) public key and L is a label given by the principal/publisher which needs to ensure that names are unique. Given the hierarchical structure of the architecture, a challenge for DONA is the stress on the top-level resolution-handler (assuming we’re addressing the entire Internet).

Material:

• Paper: http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/fp177-koponen1.pdf

3) NetInf: Network of Information

NetInf is the product of an EU project (which ended around 2015 or so) which resembles a lot the IPFS structure. NetInf is building on name-resolution-based routing (through a Name-Resolution System - NRS). The NRS is a multi-level DHT and results have reported that the architecture can scale to several millions of nodes with lookup latencies of less than 100ms.

Material:

• Overall Architecture paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140366413000364

• Measurement/Simulation study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140366413000418

[1] Van Jacobson’s 2006 Google Tech Talk - A New Way to Look at Networking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg

[daviddias]

I've added this Workshop to the IPFS Community Calendar (17:00 UTC, or 10:00 PT, 13:00 EDT, 18:00 WEST, 19:00 CEST)

The Zoom URL to join will be protocol.zoom.us/j/401098033

[bertrandfalguiere]

Will this be recorded? 📹 💾 :)

[yiannisbot]

Yes, we plan to record it and make it available later.

Please also note, it's going to be at 5pm UTC on the 31st July and not at 6pm UTC as mentioned above.

[jsoares]

Edited the post above to clarify time zones. The correct times are:

17:00 UTC

10am PDT (San Francisco)
1pm EDT (New York)
18:00 WEST (Lisbon)
19:00 CEST (Amsterdam)

[jsoares]

For those unable to attend, here are the recording and slides. Feedback welcome!

cc @bertrandfalguiere