ICN Research Group R. Ravindran
Internet-Draft A. Chakraborti
Intended status: Informational S. Amin
Expires: September 22, 2016 Huawei Technologies
M. Mosko
I. Solis
PARC
March 21, 2016

Support for Notifications in CCN
draft-ravi-ccn-notification-01

Abstract

This draft proposes a new packet primitive called Notification for CCN. Notification is a PUSH primitive and can be unicast or multicast to multiple listening points. Notifications do not expect a Content Object response hence only requires the use of FIB state in the CCN forwarder. Emulating Notification as a PULL has performance and forwarding implications. The draft proposes a new fixed header primitive called Notification and a CCN message encoding using Content Object primitive to transport Notifications. These discussions are presented in the context of CCNx1.0 [1] proposal.

Status of This Memo

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Notification is a PUSH primitive used in the Internet today by many IoT and social applications. The nature of notifications varies with the application scenario, ranging from being mission critical to one that is best effort. Notifications can be unicast or multicast depending on whether the notification service is aware of all the consumers or not. A notification service is preceded by a consumer subscribing to a specific event such as, subscription to hash-tag feeds, health emergency notification service, or temperature sensor reading from a room in a building; following this subscription the service pushes notifications to consuming entities. It has to be noted that certain IoT applications expects notification end-to-end latency of few milliseconds [2]. Industrial IoT applications have more stringent requirement in terms of QoS, timeliness, and reliability of message delivery. Though we term it as a Notification, this primitive can also be used for transactional exchange between two points.

CCN optimizes networking around efficiently distributing already published content which the consumers learn through mechanisms like manifests containing the names of published content chunks and their locations. Applications relying on notifications requires event driven data to be pushed from multiple producers to multiple subscribers for which the current Interest/Data primitive is inefficient. This draft proposes to extend CCN's current primitives set with a new notification primitive that can be processed in a new way by the CCN forwarder to serve notification objectives. Notification here implies a PUSH semantic that is available with IP today and supported by other FIA architectures like MobilityFirst [10] and XIA [11].

2. Notification Requirements in CCN

General notification requirements have been discussed in CoAP's Observe proposal [4] to push notifications from the server to the clients. Here we discuss basic notification requirements from CCN's network layer perspective. Other requirements related to reliability, low latency, flow control can be engineered by the application or through more network layer state once the following requirements are met.

3. Current Approaches

Recent CCN and NDN research [6] [7] have studied the problem of handling notifications and have proposed several solutions to handle this. However these approaches are not satisfactory as they use the current Interest and Data primitive to achieve notification objectives. These approaches are:

To summarize CCN and NDN operates on PULL primitive optimized for content distribution applications. Emulating PUSH operation over PULL has the following issues: 1) it is a mismatch between an application's intent to PUSH data and the PULL APIs currently available; 2) unless Interests are marked distinctly, overloading Interests with notification data will undergo PIT/CS processing and are also subjected to similar routing and forwarding policies as regular Interests which is inefficient; 3) another concern in treating PUSH as PULL is with respect to the effect of local strategy layer routing policies, where applying the intent to experiment with multiple faces to fetch content is not required for notification messages.

This motivates the need for treating notifications as a separate class of traffic which would allow a forwarder to apply the appropriate processing, routing and forwarding processing in the network.

4. Proposed Notification Primitive in CCN

Notification is a new type of packet hence can be subjected to different processing logic by a forwarder. By definition, a notification message is a PUSH primitive, hence is not subjected to PIT/CS processing. This primitive can also be used by any other transactional or content distribution application towards service authentication or exchanging contextual information between end points and the service.

5. Notification Message Encoding

The wire packet format for a Notification is shown in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2. Fig. 1 shows the Notification fixed header considering the CCNx1.0 encoding, and Fig. 2 shows the format for the CCN Notification message, which is used to transport the notification data. We next discuss these two packet segments of the Notification message.

  
                                             1                   2                   3
                         0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
                        +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+
                        |    Version    |  PacketType=  |                              |
                        |               | Notification  |         PacketLength         |
                        +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+
                        |   HopLimit    |   Reserved    |     Flags     | HeaderLength |
                        +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+
                        /                  Optional Hop-by-hop header TLVs             /
                        +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+
                        /              Content Object as Notification Message          /
                        +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+

                                  Figure 1: CCN Notification fixed header
                       
  
  
                                              1                   2                   3
                          0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
                         +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+
                         |MessageType = Content Object   |         MessageLength        |
                         +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+
                         |                    Name TLV                                  |
                         +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+
                         |                    Optional MetaData TLVs                    |
                         +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+
                         | Message Payload Type          |         Message Type Length  |
                         +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+    
                         |                    Payload or Optional Content Object        |
                         +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+
                         /         Optional CCNx ValidationAlgorithm TLV                /
                         +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+
                         / Optional CCNx ValidationPayload TLV (ValidationAlg required) /
                         +---------------+---------------+---------------+--------------+
                       
                                    Figure 2: CCN Notification Message 
                       
  

Notification Fixed Header: The fields in the fixed header that have new meaning in the context of notifications are discussed next, while the other fields follow the definition in [1].

CCN Notification message: The CCN Notification message is a Content Object as in [1]. Notifications are always routed on the top level Content Object (outer CO) name. Notification itself can be encoded in two forms depending on the application requirement:

The interpretation of the fields shown in Fig. 2 are as follows:

6. Notification Processing

The following steps are followed by a CCN forwarder to process the Notification packet.

7. Security Considerations

The proposed processing logic of Notifications that bypass the processing of PIT/CS has the following security implications:

Flow Balance : PIT state maintains the per-hop flow balance over all the available faces by enforcing a simple rule, that is, one Content Object is send over a face for a single Interest. Bypassing PIT processing compromises this flow balancing property. For scenarios where the notification traffic volume is not high such as for IoT applications, the impact may not be significant. However, this may not be the case considering the plethora of social networking and emerging IoT applications in a general Internet scenario. This flow balance tradeoff has to be understood considering an application's intent to PUSH data and the latency introduced by processing such traffic if a PULL primitive is used. Also PIT offers a natural defense mechanism by throttling traffic at the network edge, considering the provisioned PIT size, and bypassing it could exacerbate DDOS attacks on producing end points.

Cache Poisoning: This draft doesn't recommend the caching of the Content Object in the Notification payload, though doing so might help in increasing the availability of notification information in the network. A possible exception would be if the inner CO is a nameless object [12]. as those can only be fetched from CS by hash We leave this possibility of applying policy-based caching of Notification Content Objects for future exploration. The recommendation for not caching these Content objects is that, in a regular Interest/Content Object exchange, content arrives at the forwarder and is cached as a result of per-hop active Interest expression. Unsolicited Content Objects, as in the case of the Notification, violates this rule, which could be exploited by malicious producers to generate DDOS attack against the cache resource of a CCN infrastructure.

8. Annex

8.1. Routing Notifications

Appropriate routing policies should be employed to ensure reliable forwarding of a notification to its one or many intended receivers. The name in the notification identifies a host or a multicast service being listened to by the multiple intended receivers. Two types of routing strategies can be adopted to handle notifications, depending on whether or not an explicit pub/sub state is maintained in the forwarder.

8.2. Notification reliability

This proposal doesn't provide any form of reliability. Reliability can be realized by the specific application using the proposed notification primitive, for instance using the following potential approaches:

Caching: This proposal doesn't propose any form of caching. But caching feature can be explored to improve notification reliability, and this is a subject of future study. For instance, consumers, which expect notifications and use external means (such as periodic updates or by receiving manifests) to track notifications, can recover the lost notifications using the PULL feature of CCN.

Notification Acknowledgment: If the producer maintains per-receiver state, then the consumer can send back notification ACK or NACK to the producer of having received or not received them.

8.3. Use Case Scenarios

Here we provide the discussions related to the use of Notification in different scenarios.

8.3.1. Realizing PUB/SUB System

A PUB/SUB system provides a service infrastructure for subscribers to request update on a set of topics of interest, and with multicast publishers publishing content on those topics. A PUB/SUB system maps the subscribers' interests to published contents and pushes them as Notifications to the subscribers. A PUB/SUB system has many requirements as discussed in [6] which include low latency, reliability, fast recovery, scalability, security, minimizing false (positive/negative) notifications.

Current IP based PUB/SUB systems suffer from interoperability challenges because of application-defined naming approach and lack of support of multicast in the data plane. The proposed Notification primitive can be used to realize large scale PUB/SUB system, as it unifies naming in the network layer and support for name-based multicasting.

Depending on the routing strategy discussed earlier, two kind of PUB/SUB approaches can be realized : 1) Rendezvous style approach ; 2) Distributed approach. Each of these approaches can use the Notification primitive to implement their PUSH service.

In the Rendezvous style approach, a logically centralized service maps subscriber's topic interest with the publisher's content and pushes it as notifications. If stateless forwarding is used, the routing entries contain specific application-ID's requesting a given notification, to handle scalability, a group of these application can share a multicast-ID reducing the state in the FIB.

In the Distributed approach, the CCN/NDN protocol is further enhanced with new subscription primitive for the subscription interested consumers. When a consumer explicitly susbcribes to a multicast topic, its subscription request is forwarded to the upstream forwarder which manages this state mapping between subscription names to the downstream faces which has expressed interest for Notifications being pushed under that prefix. An example of the network layer based approach is the COPSS notification proposal [6]. Here a PUB/SUB multi-cast state state, called the subscribers interest table, is managed in the forwarders. When a Notification arrives at a forwarder, the content descriptor in the notification is matched to the PUB/SUB state in the forwarder to decide the faces over which the Notification has to be forwarded.

9. Informative References

[1] CCN Wire format, CCNX1., "http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-mosko-icnrg-ccnxmessages-00.txt.", 2013.
[2] Osseiran, A., "Scenarios for 5G Mobile and Wireless Communications: The Vision of the METIS Project.", IEEE Communication Magazine , 2014.
[3] DNS Security Introduction and Requirements, DNS-SEC., "http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4033.txt.", 2005.
[4] Observing Resources in CoAp, observe., "https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-core-observe-16.", 2015.
[5] Cisco System Inc., CISCO., "Cisco visual networking index: Global mobile data traffic forecast update.", 2009-2014.
[6] Chen, J., Arumaithurai, M., Jiao, L., Fu, X. and K. Ramakrishnan, "COPS: An Efficient Content Oriented Publish/Subscribe System.", ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS 2011) , 2011.
[7] Amadeo, M., Campolo, C. and A. Molinaro, "Internet of Things via Named Data Networking: The Support of Push Traffic", Network of the Future (NOF), 2014 International Conference and Workshop on the , 2014.
[8] Francois et al, J., "CCN Traffic Optimization for IoT", Proc. of NoF , 2013.
[9] CCNx Label Forwarding, CCNLF., "http://www.ccnx.org/pubs/ccnx-mosko-labelforwarding-01.txt.", 2013.
[10] NSF FIA project, MobilityFirst., "http://www.nets-fia.net/", 2010.
[11] NSF FIA project, XIA., "https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~xia/", 2010.
[12] Mosko, M., "Nameless Objects.", IETF/ICNRG, Paris Interim 2016, 2016.

Authors' Addresses

Ravishankar Ravindran Huawei Technologies 2330 Central Expressway Santa Clara, CA 95050 USA EMail: ravi.ravindran@huawei.com
Asit Chakraborti Huawei Technologies 2330 Central Expressway Santa Clara, CA 95050 USA EMail: asit.chakraborti@huawei.com
Syed Obaid Amin Huawei Technologies 2330 Central Expressway Santa Clara, CA 95050 USA EMail: obaid.amin@huawei.com
Marc Mosko PARC Palo Alto, California 94304 USA Phone: +01 650-812-4405 EMail: marc.mosko@parc.com
Ignacio Solis PARC Palo Alto, California 94304 USA Phone: +01 650-812-4405 EMail: ignacio.solis@parc.com