Practical Accounting in Content-Centric Networking

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a recent network paradigm designed to address some key limitations of the current IP-based Internet. One of its main features is in-network content caching which allows requests for content to be served by routers. Despite the benefits of improved bandwidth utilization and lower latency of retrieving popular content, in-network caching inhibits producers from collecting information about content that is requested and later served from network caches. Such information is often needed for accounting and popularity purposes. In this paper, we address accounting in CCN by varying the degree of consumer, router, and producer involvement. We also identify and analyze inherent performance and security tradeoffs. We show that fine-grained accounting is infeasible with router caches and without explicit application support. We then recommend accounting strategies that entail a few simple requirements for CCN architectures. Finally, we show, via experimental results, that network-layer CCN accounting is viable and incurs low overhead for all parties involved. approaches.