Service-First Networking: Provisioning Services over Named-Data Networking

Named-Data Networking (NDN) is a promising future networking architecture that advocates a content name-based communication model, moving from interconnecting endpoints (where) to content exchange (what). However, NDN is designed with the assumption that content is static and ready to be served upon request. Modern Internet usage is more centered around services than content: Emails, streaming, social media, e-shopping, and e-banking are all ex- ample services where computations are required to handle requests and deliver results.
NDN in its current form lacks essential functionalities to support services, such as support for long living Interests and load balancing. In this thesis, we explore the fundamental differences between content (i.e., static data objects) and services (i.e., dynamically created data objects). We introduce the Service- First Networking (SFN) architecture that adapts and augments NDN in order to reduce these differences and support services seamlessly.
The first issue with NDN-based service invocation is with the way a service is named. Services often have parameters and the naming scheme should sup- port multiple parameters of different types. We implement an SFN prototype, called NextServe, where an extra layer is added to translate service requests into service invocations.
The second issue is with long running computations. We propose two solutions to account for prolonged computations such that consumers do not timeout and resend requests causing unnecessary re-computations.
Third, when a service becomes popular, it needs to be scaled up by adding more service replicas in order to serve the increasing number of requests. This leads to the need for a load balancing mechanism in the network. We introduce a new forwarding strategy called Communicating Vessels in order to distribute service requests between replicas efficiently. Besides, the addition of replicas re- quires an efficient protocol to monitor and manage them. We introduce a monitoring protocol over NDN called Name-Centric Monitoring Protocol (NCMP) which allows a controller to scan service replicas in order to manage the replication in a pure NDN architecture.
Finally, we explore authenticating transformation services that change the content. This type of services renders the original signature useless for con- tent authentication unless the authentication mechanism is extended to these transformations. We discuss the theoretical solutions for authenticity in three cases with increasing complexities: simple arithmetic operations like temperature transformation, modifying a part of a content object like filtering texts, and finally transcoding multimedia like image or video transformations.
In this thesis we show how service provisioning in NDN requires an ecosystem of functionalities that should be provided at the network level. We discuss, propose, implement, and analyze these functionalities, evolving the architecture towards a complete Service-First Networking.