ICNRG J. Seedorf
Internet-Draft HFT Stuttgart - Univ. of Applied Sciences
Intended status: Informational M. Arumaithurai
Expires: May 29, 2020 University of Göttingen
A. Tagami
KDDI Research Inc.
K. Ramakrishnan
University of California
N. Blefari Melazzi
University Tor Vergata
November 26, 2019

Research Directions for Using ICN in Disaster Scenarios
draft-irtf-icnrg-disaster-09

Abstract

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new paradigm where the network provides users with named content, instead of communication channels between hosts. This document outlines some research directions for Information Centric Networking with respect to applying ICN approaches for coping with natural or human-generated, large-scale disasters. This document is a product of the Information-Centric Networking Research Group (ICNRG).

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

This document summarizes some research challenges for coping with natural or human-generated, large-scale disasters. In particular, the document discusses potential research directions for applying Information Centric Networking (ICN) to address these challenges.

There are existing research approaches (for instance, see further the work and discussions in the IETF DTN Working Group [dtnwg] ) and an IETF specification [RFC5050] for Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), which is a key necessity for communicating in the disaster scenarios we are considering in this document (see further Section 3.1 ). 'Disconnection tolerance' can thus be achieved with these existing DTN approaches. However, while these approaches can provide independence from an existing communication infrastructure (which indeed may not work anymore after a disaster has happened), ICN offers as key concepts suitable naming schemes and multicast communication which together enable many key (publish/subscribe-based) use cases for communication after a disaster (e.g. message prioritisation, one-to-many delivery of important messages, or group communication among rescue teams, see further Section 4 ). One could add such features to existing DTN protocols and solutions; however, in this document we explore the use of ICN as starting point for building a communication architecture that supports (somewhat limited) communication capabilities after a disaster. We discuss the relationship between the ICN approaches (for enabling communication after a disaster) discussed in this document with existing work from the DTN community in more depth in Section 3.3 .

'Emergency Support and Disaster Recovery' is also listed among the ICN Baseline Scenarios in [RFC7476] as a potential scenario that 'can be used as a base for the evaluation of different information-centric networking (ICN) approaches so that they can be tested and compared against each other while showcasing their own advantages' [RFC7476] . In this regard, this document complements [RFC7476] by investigating the use of ICN approaches for 'Emergency Support and Disaster Recovery' in depth and discussing the relationship to existing work in the DTN community.

This document focuses on ICN-based approaches that can enable communication after a disaster. These approaches reside mostly on the networking layer. Other solutions for 'Emergency Support and Disaster Recovery', e.g., on the application layer, may complement the ICN-based networking approaches discussed in this document and expand the solution space for enabling communications among users after a disaster. In fact, addressing the use cases explored in this document would require corresponding applications that would exploit the discussed ICN-benefits on the networking layer for users. However, the discussion of applications or solutions outside of the networking layer are outside the scope of this document.

This document represents the consensus of the Information-Centric Networking Research Group (ICNRG); it is not an IETF product and it does not define a standard. It has been reviewed extensively by the ICN Research Group (RG) members active in the specific areas of work covered by the document.

Section 2 gives some examples of what can be considered a large-scale disaster and what the effects of such disasters on communication networks are. Section 3 outlines why ICN can be beneficial in such scenarios and provides a high-level overview on corresponding research challenges. Section 4 describes some concrete use cases and requirements for disaster scenarios. In Section 5 , some concrete ICN-based solutions approaches are outlined.

2. Disaster Scenarios

An enormous earthquake hit Northeastern Japan (Tohoku areas) on March 11, 2011, and caused extensive damages including blackouts, fires, tsunamis and a nuclear crisis. The lack of information and means of communication caused the isolation of several Japanese cities. This impacted the safety and well-being of residents, and affected rescue work, evacuation activities, and the supply chain for food and other essential items. Even in the Tokyo area that is 300km away from the Tohoku area, more than 100,000 people became 'returner' refugees, who could not reach their homes because they had no means of public transportation (the Japanese government has estimated that more than 6.5 million people would become returner refugees if such a catastrophic disaster were to hit the Tokyo area).

That earthquake in Japan also showed that the current network is vulnerable to disasters. Mobile phones have become the lifelines for communication including safety confirmation: Besides (emergency) phone calls, services in mobile networks commonly being used after a disaster include network disaster SMS notifications (or SMS 'Cell Broadcast' [cellbroadcast]), available in most cellular networks. The aftermath of a disaster puts a high strain on available resources due to the need for communication by everyone. Authorities such as the President/Prime-Minister, local authorities, Police, fire brigades, and rescue and medical personnel would like to inform the citizens of possible shelters, food, or even of impending danger. Relatives would like to communicate with each other and be informed about their wellbeing. Affected citizens would like to make enquiries of food distribution centres, shelters or report trapped and missing people to the authorities. Moreover, damage to communication equipment, in addition to the already existing heavy demand for communication highlights the issue of fault-tolerance and energy efficiency.

Additionally, disasters caused by humans such as a terrorist attack may need to be considered, i.e. disasters that are caused deliberately and willfully and have the element of human intent. In such cases, the perpetrators could be actively harming the network by launching a Denial-of-Service attack or by monitoring the network passively to obtain information exchanged, even after the main disaster itself has taken place. Unlike some natural disasters that are to a small extent predictable using weather forecasting technologies, may have a slower onset, and occur in known geographical regions and seasons, terrorist attacks almost always occur suddenly without any advance warning. Nevertheless, there exist many commonalities between natural and human-induced disasters, particularly relating to response and recovery, communication, search and rescue, and coordination of volunteers.

The timely dissemination of information generated and requested by all the affected parties during and the immediate aftermath of a disaster is difficult to provide within the current context of global information aggregators (such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.) that need to index the vast amounts of specialized information related to the disaster. Specialized coverage of the situation and timely dissemination are key to successfully managing disaster situations. We believe that network infrastructure capabilities provided by Information Centric Networks can be suitable, in conjunction with application and middleware assistance.

3. Research Challenges and Benefits of ICN

3.1. High-Level Research Challenges

Given a disaster scenario as described in Section 2, on a high-level one can derive the following (incomplete) list of corresponding technical challenges:

3.2. How ICN can be Beneficial

Several aspects of ICN make related approaches attractive candidates for addressing the challenges described in Section 3.1 . Below is an (incomplete) list of considerations why ICN approaches can be beneficial to address these challenges:

3.3. ICN as Starting Point vs. Existing DTN Solutions

There has been quite some work in the DTN (Delay Tolerant Networking) community on disaster communication (for instance, see further the work and discussions in the IETF DTN Working Group [dtnwg] ). However, most DTN work lacks important features such as publish/subscribe (pub/sub) capabilities, caching, multicast delivery, and message prioritisation based on content types, which are needed in the disaster scenarios we consider. One could add such features to existing DTN protocols and solutions, and indeed individual proposals for adding such features to DTN protocols have been made (e.g. [Greifenberg2008] [Yoneki2007] propose the use of a pub/sub-based multicast distribution infrastructure for DTN-based opportunistic networking environments).

However, arguably ICN---having these intrinsic properties (as also outlined above)---makes a better starting point for building a communication architecture that works well before and after a disaster. For a disaster-enhanced ICN system this would imply the following advantages: a) ICN data mules would have built-in caches and can thus return content for interests straight on, b) requests do not necessarily need to be routed to a source (as with existing DTN protocols), instead any data mule or end-user can in principle respond to an interest, c) built-in multi-cast delivery implies energy-efficient large-scale spreading of important information which is crucial in disaster scenarios, and d) pub/sub extension for popular ICN implementations exist [COPSS2011] which are very suitable for efficient group communication in disasters and provide better reliability, timeliness and scalability as compared to existing pub/sub approaches in DTN [Greifenberg2008] [Yoneki2007] .

Finally, most DTN routing algorithms have been solely designed for particular DTN scenarios. By extending ICN approaches for DTN-like scenarios, one ensures that a solution works in regular (i.e. well-connected) settings just as well (which can be important in reality, where a routing algorithm should work before and after a disaster). It is thus reasonable to start with existing ICN approaches and extend them with the necessary features needed in disaster scenarios. In any case, solutions for disaster scenarios need a combination of ICN-features and DTN-capabilities.

4. Use Cases and Requirements

This Section describes some use cases for the aforementioned disaster scenario (as outlined in Section 2 ) and discusses the corresponding technical requirements for enabling these use cases. Section 3.2 , ICN approaches are envisioned to be very suitable for addressing these requirements with actual technical solutions. In [Robitzsch2015] , a more elaborate set of requirements is provided that addresses, among disaster scenarios, a communication infrastructure for communities facing several geographic, economic and political challenges.

It can be observed that different key use cases for disaster scenarios imply overlapping and similar technical requirements for fulfilling them. As discussed in

5. ICN-based Research Approaches and Open Research Challenges

This section outlines some ICN-based research approaches that aim at fulfilling the previously mentioned use cases and requirements (Section 5.1). Most of these works provide proof-of-concept type soluions, addressing singular challenges. Thus, several open issues remain which are summarized in Section 5.2.

5.1. Suggested ICN-based Research Approaches

The research community has investigated ICN-based solutions to address the aforementioned challenges in disaster scenarios. Overall, the focus is on delivery of messages and not real-time communication. While most probably users would like to conduct real-time voice/video calls after a disaster, in the extreme scenario we consider (with users being scattered over different fragmented networks, see Section 2), somewhat delayed message delivery appears to be inevitable, and full-duplex real-time communication seems infeasible to achieve (unless users are in close proximity). Thus, the assumption is that - for a certain amount of time at least (i.e. the initial period until the regular communication infrastructure has been repaired) - users would need to live with message delivery and publish/subscribe services but without real-time communication. Note, however, that a) in principle ICN can support VoIP calls; thus, if users are in close proximity, (duplex) voice communication via ICN is possible [Gusev2015], and b) delayed message delivery can very well include (recorded) voice messages.

5.2. Open Research Challenges

The proposed solutions in Section 5.1 investigate how ICN approaches can in principal address some of the outlined challenges. However, several research challenges remain open and still need to be addressed. The following (incomplete) list summarizes some unanswered research questions and items that are being investigated by researchers:

6. Security Considerations

This document does not define a new protocol (or protocol extension) or a particular mechanism, and therefore introduces no specific new security considerations. General security considerations for Information-Centric Networking -- which also apply when using ICN networking techniques to communicate after a disaster -- are discussed in [RFC7945].

The after-disaster communication scenario which is the focus of this document raises particular attention to decentralised authentication, content integrity, and trust as key research challenges (as outlined in Section 3.1). The corresponding use cases and ICN-based research approaches discussed in this document thus imply certain security requirements. In particular data origin authentication, data integrity, and access control are key requirements for many use cases in the aftermath of a disaster (see Section 4).

In principle, the kinds of disasters discussed in this document can happen as a result of a natural disaster, accident or by human-error. However, also intentional actions can cause such a disaster (e.g., a terrorist attack, as mentioned in Section 2). In this case, i.e., intentionally caused disasters by attackers, special attention needs to be paid when re-enabling communications as temporary, somewhat un-reliable communications with potential limited security features may be anticipated and abused by attackers (e.g., to circulate false messages to cause further intentional chaos among the human population). Potential solutions on how to cope with intentionally caused disasters by attackers and on how to enable a secure communications infrastructure after such an intentionally caused disaster are out of scope of this document.

This document has summarized research directions for addressing these challenges and requirements, such as efforts in data-centric confidentiality and access control as well as recent works for decentralised authentication of messages in a disaster-struck networking infrastructure with non-functional routing links and limited communication capabilities (see Section 5).

7. Conclusion

This document has outlined some research directions for Information Centric Networking (ICN) with respect to applying ICN approaches for coping with natural or human-generated, large-scale disasters. The document has described high-level research challenges for enabling communication after a disaster has happened as well as a general rationale why ICN approaches could be beneficial to address these challenges. Further, concrete use cases have been described and how these can be addressed with ICN-based approaches has been discussed.

Finally, the document provided an overview of examples of existing ICN-based solutions that address the previously outlined research challenges. These concrete solutions demonstrate that indeed the communication challenges in the aftermath of a disaster can be addressed with techniques that have ICN paradigms at their base, validating our overall reasoning. However, further, more detailed challenges exist and more research is necessary in all areas discussed: efficient content distribution and routing in fragmented networks, traffic prioritization, security, and energy-efficiency. An incomplete, high-level list of such open research challenges has concluded the document.

In order to deploy ICN-based solutions for disaster-aftermath communication in actual mobile networks, standardized ICN baseline protocols are a must: It is unlikely to expect all user equipment in a large-scale mobile network to be from the same vendor. In this respect, the work being done in the IRTF ICNRG is very useful as it works towards standards for concrete ICN protocols that enable interopability among solutions from different vendors. These protocols - currently being standardized in the IRTF INCRG - provide a good foundation for deploying ICN-based disaster-aftermath communication and thereby addressing key use cases that arise in such situations (as outlined in this document).

8. IANA Considerations

This document requests no IANA actions.

9. References

9.1. Normative References

[RFC5050] Scott, K. and S. Burleigh, "Bundle Protocol Specification", RFC 5050, DOI 10.17487/RFC5050, November 2007.
[RFC6920] Farrell, S., Kutscher, D., Dannewitz, C., Ohlman, B., Keranen, A. and P. Hallam-Baker, "Naming Things with Hashes", RFC 6920, DOI 10.17487/RFC6920, April 2013.
[RFC7476] Pentikousis, K., Ohlman, B., Corujo, D., Boggia, G., Tyson, G., Davies, E., Molinaro, A. and S. Eum, "Information-Centric Networking: Baseline Scenarios", RFC 7476, DOI 10.17487/RFC7476, March 2015.
[RFC7945] Pentikousis, K., Ohlman, B., Davies, E., Spirou, S. and G. Boggia, "Information-Centric Networking: Evaluation and Security Considerations", RFC 7945, DOI 10.17487/RFC7945, September 2016.

9.2. Informative References

[cellbroadcast] Wikipedia, "Cell Broadcast - Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_Broadcast", (online)
[COPSS2011] Chen, J., Arumaithurai, M., Jiao, L., Fu, X. and K. Ramakrishnan, "COPSS: An Efficient Content Oriented Publish/Subscribe System", Seventh ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS), 2011
[dtnwg] Fall, K. and J. Ott, "Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking WG", https://tools.ietf.org/wg/dtn/
[Greifenberg2008] Greifenberg, J. and D. Kutscher, "Efficient publish/subscribe-based multicast for opportunistic networking with self-organized resource utilization", Advanced Information Networking and Applications-Workshops, 2008
[Gusev2015] Gusev, P. and J. Burke, "NDN-RTC: Real-Time Videoconferencing over Named Data Networking", 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2015), Sep. 30 - Oct. 2, San Francisco, CA, USA
[Psaras2014] Psaras, I., Saino, L., Arumaithurai, M., Ramakrishnan, K. and G. Pavlou, "Name-Based Replication Priorities in Disaster Cases", 2nd Workshop on Name Oriented Mobility (NOM), 2014
[Robitzsch2015] Robitzsch, S., Trossen, D., Theodorou, C., Barker, T. and A. Sathiaseel, "D2.1: Usage Scenarios and Requirements"", H2020 project RIFE, public deliverable, 2015
[Seedorf2014] Seedorf, J., Kutscher, D. and F. Schneider, "Decentralised Binding of Self-Certifying Names to Real-World Identities for Assessment of Third-Party Messages in Fragmented Mobile Networks", 2nd Workshop on Name Oriented Mobility (NOM), 2014
[Seedorf2016] Seedorf, J., Kutscher, D. and B. Gill, "Decentralised Interest Counter Aggregation for ICN in Disaster Scenarios", Workshop on Information Centric Networking Solutions for Real World Applications (ICNSRA), 2016
[Sourlas2015] Sourlas, V., Tassiulas, L., Psaras, I. and G. Pavlou, "Information Resilience through User-Assisted Caching in Disruptive Content-Centric Networks", 14th IFIP NETWORKING, May 2015
[Tagami2016] Tagami, A., Yagyu, T., Sugiyama, K., Arumaithurai, M., Nakamura, K., Hasegawa, T., Asami, T. and K. Ramakrishnan, "Name-based Push/Pull Message Dissemination for Disaster Message Board", The 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANMAN), 2016
[Trossen2015] Trossen, D., "IP over ICN - The better IP?", 2015 European Conference onNetworks and Communications (EuCNC), June/July 2015, pp. 413 - 417
[Yoneki2007] Yoneki, E., Hui, P., Chan, S. and J. Crowcroft, "A socio-aware overlay for publish/subscribe communication in delay tolerant networks", Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems, 2007

Appendix A. Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Ioannis Psaras for useful comments. Also, the authors are grateful to Christopher Wood and Daniel Corujo for valuable feedback and suggestions on concrete text for improving the document. Further, the authors would like to thank Joerg Ott and Dirk Trossen for valuable comments and input, in particular regarding existing work from the DTN community which is highly related to the ICN approaches suggested in this document. Also, Akbar Rahman provided useful comments and usggestions, in particular regarding existing disaster warning mechanisms in today's mobile phone networks.

This document has been supported by the GreenICN project (GreenICN: Architecture and Applications of Green Information Centric Networking ), a research project supported jointly by the European Commission under its 7th Framework Program (contract no. 608518) and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan (contract no. 167). The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the GreenICN project, the European Commission, or NICT. More information is available at the project web site http://www.greenicn.org/.

Authors' Addresses

Jan Seedorf HFT Stuttgart - Univ. of Applied Sciences Schellingstrasse 24 Stuttgart, 70174 Germany Phone: +49 711 8926 2801 Fax: +49 711 8926 2553 EMail: jan.seedorf@hft-stuttgart.de
Mayutan Arumaithurai University of Göttingen Goldschmidt Str. 7 Göttingen , 37077 Germany Phone: +49 551 39 172046 Fax: +49 551 39 14416 EMail: arumaithurai@informatik.uni-goettingen.de
Atsushi Tagami KDDI Research Inc. 2-1-15 Ohara Fujimino, Saitama , 356-85025 Japan Phone: +81 49 278 73651 Fax: +81 49 278 7510 EMail: tagami@kddi-research.jp
K. K. Ramakrishnan University of California Riverside, CA USA EMail: kkramakrishnan@yahoo.com
Nicola Blefari Melazzi University Tor Vergata Via del Politecnico, 1 Roma, 00133 Italy Phone: +39 06 7259 7501 Fax: +39 06 7259 7435 EMail: blefari@uniroma2.it