UC Santa Cruz

It has been shown that the current Internet architecture is not well suited to current and emerging traffic demands. Many content distribution technologies such as content delivery networks (CDN), and peer-to-peer systems have emerged to allow content access by name rather than server location or address. Furthermore, to respond to the increasing volumes of traffic for such applications as video on demand and cloud computing, many efforts have been undertaken to enable caching, content replication, and processing within the network. Such technologies are highly dependent on the distribution channel and perform as an overlay on the current Internet architecture, which results in a number of inefficiencies.

Information Centric Network (ICN) architectures have been proposed as an alternative to the current Internet architecture. The focus of ICN architectures is on caching, replicating, and distributing data by name, independently of their locations.

In this dissertation, the most popular ICN architectures, Named Data Networking (NDN) and Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) are evaluated and problems of such designs in different aspects such as caching, forwarding, and security are introduced. To address the weaknesses of these architectures, we propose a new ICN architectures and compare it with NDN and CCNx using simulation experiments. The results of these experiments show that the proposed new architectures improve network performance in terms of loop detection, forwarding table size, routing table size, processing overhead, and scalability.

Although the aggregation of packets which is used in some ICN architectures might not be very helpful in presence of in-network caching, we show that it can be highly effective where the amount of signaling overhead plays a major role in the performance of the protocol. We propose a new routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks, called ADARA, which improves the performance of on-demand routing protocols by ”aggregating” route request packets. Results indicate that aggregating route requests can make on-demand routing more efficient than existing proactive or on-demand routing protocols.