Network Tomography for Information-Centric Networking

This paper proposes a network tomography scheme for information-centric networking (ICN), which we call ICN tomography. When content is received over a conventional IP network, the communication occurs after converting the content name into an IP address, which is the locator, so as to identify the position of the network. By contrast, in ICN, communication is achieved by directly specifying the content name or content ID. The content is sent to the requesting user by a nearby node having the content or cache, making it difficult to apply a conventional network tomography that uses end-to-end quality of service (QoS) measurements and routing information between the source and destination node pairs as input to the ICN. This is because, in ICN, the end-to-end flow for an end host receiving some content can take various routes; therefore, the intermediate and source nodes can vary. In this paper, we first describe the technical challenges of applying network tomography to ICN. We then propose ICN tomography, where we use the content name as an endpoint to define an end-to-end QoS measurement and a routing matrix. In defining the routing matrix, we assume that the end-to-end flow follows a probabilistic routing. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated through a numerical analysis and simulation.