Dynamic Unicast: Information-centric multi-hop routing for mobile ad-hoc networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) offers new perspectives on mobile ad-hoc communication because routing is based on names but not on endpoint identifiers. Since every content object has a unique name and is signed, authentic content can be stored and cached by any node. If connectivity to a content source breaks, it is not necessarily required to build a new path to the same source but content can also be retrieved from a closer node that provides the same content copy. For example, in case of collisions, retransmissions do not need to be performed over the entire path but due to caching only over the link where the collision occurred. Furthermore, multiple requests can be aggregated to improve scalability of wireless multi-hop communication. In this work, we base our investigations on Content-Centric Networking (CCN), which is a popular ICN architecture. While related works in wireless CCN communication are based on broadcast communication exclusively, we show that this is not needed for efficient mobile ad-hoc communication. With Dynamic Unicast requesters can build unicast paths to content sources after they have been identified via broadcast. We have implemented Dynamic Unicast in CCNx, which provides a reference implementation of the CCN concepts, and performed extensive evaluations in diverse mobile scenarios using NS3-DCE, the direct code execution framework for the NS3 network simulator. Our evaluations show that Dynamic Unicast can result in more efficient communication than broadcast communication, but still supports all CCN advantages such as caching, scalability and implicit content discovery.