ICN Research Group                                          R. Ravindran
Internet-Draft                                            A. Chakraborti
Intended status: Informational                                   S. Amin
Expires: January 8, 2017                             Huawei Technologies
                                                                 J. Chen
                                              Winlab, Rutgers University
                                                                M. Mosko
                                                                I. Solis
                                                                    PARC
                                                            July 7, 2016


                    Support for Notifications in CCN
                  draft-ravi-icnrg-ccn-notification-00

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 routing 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.
   The draft also provides discussions on various aspects related to
   notification such as flow and congestion control, routing and
   reliability considerations, and use case scenarios.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on January 8, 2017.





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Copyright Notice

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   document authors.  All rights reserved.

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   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Notification Requirements in CCN  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Current Approaches  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   4.  Proposed Notification Primitive in CCN  . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   5.  Notification Message Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   6.  Notification Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   7.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   8.  Annex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     8.1.  Flow and Congestion Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
       8.1.1.  Issues with Basic Notifications . . . . . . . . . . .   9
       8.1.2.  Flow and Congestion Control Mechanims . . . . . . . .  10
         8.1.2.1.  End-to-End Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
         8.1.2.2.  Hybrid Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
       8.1.3.  Receiver Reliability  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
     8.2.  Routing Notifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
     8.3.  Notification reliability  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
     8.4.  Use Case Scenarios  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
       8.4.1.  Realizing PUB/SUB System  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
   9.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17

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



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   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.

   o  Supporting PUSH Intent: CCN should provide efficient support for
      PUSH, where application's intent is to PUSH content to listening
      application without expecting any data in return.

   o  Multicast Support: CCN network should be able to handle multicast
      notifications from a producer to multiple consumers.

   o  Security: Just as a content object in the context of Interest/Data
      primitive provides data authentication and privacy, similar
      features should also be offered by notification objects too.

   o  Routing/Forwarding Support: Name prefixes over which multicast
      notifications are managed should be handled in a different manner
      from the name prefixes over which Interest/Data primitive is used
      for content distribution.  This differentiation applies to the
      control as well as the forwarding plane.



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   o  Minimizing Processing: Notification processing in the forwarder
      should be minimized considering the application's intent to PUSH
      data to listening consumers.

3.  Current Approaches

   Recent CCN and NDN research [7][13] have studied the problem of
   handling notifications and have proposed several solutions to handle
   this.  However these approaches do not meet the above set
   requirements as they use the current Interest and Data primitive to
   achieve notification objectives.  These approaches are:

   o  Polling: This is a straight forward application of the Interest
      and Data primitive, where consumers periodically checks the
      producers for any new information.  The efficiency of this
      approach depends on the frequency of polling.  In this case, very
      low frequency may result in missing critical updates, and large
      frequency could result in high PIT occupancy by such polling
      Interests and overall higher traffic overhead.  This scheme is
      inefficient particularly for event driven and asynchronous
      updates.

   o  Long lived Interests: As the name suggests, applications can issue
      Interests set to a high lifetime to the producing nodes.
      Considering the increasing social networking and IoT application
      traffic, the number of such PIT Interests can be very large
      occupying valuable resources hence inefficient.

   o  Interest overloading: Small notifications such as actuating
      commands can be send by overloading the Interest primitive by
      adding information as suffixes to the name or including signed
      and/or encrypted data as a Interest payload [1].  As these
      Interests are used as notifications, their lifetime is set to
      zero.  Overloading Interests to convey notifications may not be
      desirable, as today the Interests are treated as a content request
      primitive by forwarders incurring unnecessary PIT/CS incurring
      unnecessary overhead.  This also opens the possibility of new
      attack vectors, such as the notifications can be blocked by
      malicious consumers who may express Interests with the same name
      (assuming names are easily derivable).  Furthermore, this prevents
      use of caching feature in the network, which is useful towards
      data recovery.

   o  Interest Trigger: Another way to use Interest is to first notify
      the consumers about a produced data, and then have the data pulled
      by the consumers.  This mechanism, in addition to the PIT
      inefficiency, it also incurs additional round trip delay before
      the produced data arrives at the listening consumer.



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   To summarize CCN and NDN operates on PULL primitive optimized for
   content distribution applications.  Emulating PUSH operation over
   PULL has the following issues:

   o  It is a mismatch between an application's intent to PUSH data and
      the PULL APIs currently available.

   o  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

   o  Another concern in treating PUSH as PULL is with respect to the
      effect of local strategy layer routing policies, where 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 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.












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                                             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].

   o  Packet Type: This new type code identifies that the packet is of
      type Notification [TBD].

   o  Optional Hop-by-hop header TLVs : Encodes any new hop-by-hop
      headers relevant to notifications [TBD].




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   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:

   o  Notification with single name: In this case the notification
      contains a single content object.  Here the producer generates
      notification using the same name used by consumers on which they
      listen on.

   o  Notification with two names: In this case the notification
      contains a top level Content Object (outer CO), that encapsulates
      another Content Object (inner CO).  With an encapsulated Content
      Object, the meaning is that notification producers and consumers
      operate on different name-spaces requiring separate name-data
      security binding.  A good application of the encapsulation format
      is a PUB/SUB service, where the consumer learns about the
      notification service name offline, and the producer who is
      decoupled from the consumer generates a new Content Object using
      its own name and pushes the notification to the consumer.

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

   o  MessageType : The CCN message type is of type Content Object.

   o  Name TLV : Name TLV in the Content Object is used to route the
      Notification.

   o  Optional Metadata TLV: These TLVs carry metadata used to describe
      the Notification payload.

   o  Message Payload Type: This is of type T_PAYLOADTYPE defined in
      CCNx.1.0 or a new encapsulation type (T_ENCAP) that indicates the
      presence of another encapsulated Content Object [TBD].

   o  Optional Encapsulated Content Object: This is an optional
      encapsulated Content Object newly defined for the Notification
      primitive.  The name in the encapsulated Content Object
      corresponds to the producer's name-space, or anything else based
      on the application logic.  The rational for an encapsulated
      Content Object was discussed earlier.

   o  Optional Security Validation data: The Content Object optionally
      carries security validation payload as per CCNx1.0.







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6.  Notification Processing

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

   o  Notification packet type is identified in the fixed header of a
      CCN packet with a new type code.  The Notification carries a
      Content Object, whose name is used for routing.  This name is
      matched against the FIB entries to determine the next hop(s).
      Novel strategy layer routing techniques catering to the
      notification traffic can be applied here.

   o  CCN forwarder also processes the optional metadata associated with
      the Notification meant for the network to help with the forwarding
      strategy, for e.g., mission critical notifications can be given
      priority over all other traffic.

   o  As mentioned earlier, CCN forwarder MUST NOT cache the Content
      Objects in the notifications.

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



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   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.  Flow and Congestion Control

8.1.1.  Issues with Basic Notifications

   As mentioned in the previous sections, one of the main issues with
   notification is the flow and congestion control.  One naive way to
   solve this issue is the routers drop the packets from aggressive
   flows.  Flow-based fair queueing (and its variation stochastic
   fairness queueing) maintain queues for flows (or the hash of flows)
   and try to give a fair share to each flow (or a hash).  Flows can be
   classified by the prefixes in the ICN case.  However, according to
   [14], the overall network throughput will be affected when there are
   multiple bottlenecks in the network.  Therefore, [14] promotes an
   end-to-end solution for congestion control.  Flow balance is a key
   requirement to an end-to-end (or end-driven) flow and congestion
   control.  In the case of CCN query/response, flow balance entails
   that an Interest pulls at most one Data object from upstream.  The
   data consumer can therefore control the amount of traffic coming from
   the data source(s) either it is a data provider or a cache in the
   network.  However, the basic notification does not follow the rule of
   flow balance (each Subscription can result in more than one
   Notifications disseminated in the network).  In the absence of a
   proper feedback mechanism to notify the data sender or the network
   the available bandwidth and local resource the consumer has, the
   sender can easily congest the bottleneck link of the receivers
   (causing congestion collapse) and/or overflow the buffer on the
   receiver side.  In the later sections, we will describe the possible
   congestion control mechanisms in ICN and how to deal with packet loss
   when both congestion control and reliability are required.

   However, the basic notification does not follow the rule of flow
   balance (each Subscription can result in more than one Notifications
   disseminated in the network).  There is no way a receiver can notify
   the data sender or the network the available bandwidth and local
   resource it has.  As a result, the sender can easily congest the
   bottleneck link of the receivers (causing congestion collapse) and/or
   overflow the buffer on the receiver side.





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8.1.2.  Flow and Congestion Control Mechanims

   Here we discuss broad approaches towards achieving flow and
   congestion control in CCN as applied to Notification traffic.  Since
   the forwarding logic of the Notification packets are quite similar to
   that of IP multicast, existing multicast congestion control solutions
   can be candidates to solve the flow/congestion control issue with
   Notification.  In addition we also summarize recent ICN research to
   address this issue.

8.1.2.1.  End-to-End Approaches

   In the multicast communication, it is not scalable to have direct
   receiver-to-sender feedback loop similar to TCP since this would
   result in each receiver sending ACKs (or NACKs) to the data sender
   and cause ACK (NACK) implosion.  To address the ACK implosion issue,
   two types of solutions have been proposed in multicast congestion
   control, namely, sender-driven approaches and receiver-driven
   approaches.

8.1.2.1.1.  Sender-driven Multicast

   In the first category, the sender controls the sending rate and to
   ensure the network friendliness, the sender usually align the sending
   rate to the slowest receiver.

   To avoid the ACK implosion issue, TCP-Friendly Multicast Congestion
   Control (TFMCC [15]) uses rate based solution.  This solution uses
   TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) to get a proper sending rate based
   on the RTT between sender and each receiver.  The sender only needs
   to collect the RTTs periodically instead of per-packet ACKs.
   Similarly, in ICN, the sender can create another channel (namespace)
   to collect the RTT measurement from the receivers.  However, due to
   the dynamics on each path, it is difficult to calculate the proper
   sending rate.

   To address the rate calculation issue, pgmcc [16], a window-based
   solution is proposed.  It uses NACKs to detect the slowest receiver
   (the ACKer).  The ACKer sends an ACK back to the sender on receiving
   each multicast packet.  A feedback loop similar to TCP is formed
   between the sender and the ACKer to control the sending rate.  Since
   the ACKer is the slowest receiver, the sender adapts its sending rate
   to the available bandwidth of the slowest receiver, the solution can
   therefore ensure the network friendliness.  In the ICN case, the
   receivers can send NACKs in the form of Notification packets through
   another namespace, and the ACKer can also use the same mechanism to
   send ACKs.




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   However, since the sender is always aligning the sending rate to the
   slowest receiver to ensure the network friendliness, the performance
   of the solutions can be dramatically affected by a very slow
   receiver.

8.1.2.1.2.  Receiver-driven Multicast

   Unlike the sender-driven solutions, the receiver-driven solutions
   [17] choose to use layered-multicast to satisfy heterogeneous
   receivers.  The sender first initiates several multicast groups
   (namespaces in the case of ICN) with different sending rates.  Each
   receiver would choose to join a multicast group with the highest
   sending rate that it can afford.  The sender can also adapt the
   sending rate of each multicast group according to the receiver
   status.

   These solutions can support applications like video streaming (with
   layered codecs) efficiently.  However, they also have some issues: 1)
   they complicate the sender and receiver logic, especially for simple
   applications like file transfer; and 2) the receivers are limited by
   the sending rates initiated by the provider and would therefore
   under-utilize the available bandwidth.

8.1.2.2.  Hybrid Approaches

   In this approach, flow balance of Notification is achieved by the
   receivers notifying the network (rather than the sender or other
   receivers) about the capacity it can receive.  Here, we take
   advantage of operating the Notification service through a receiver-
   driven approach and get support from the network.

   A solution based on this approach is proposed in [18], which we
   summarize next.

   To retain flow balance, the consumers in this solution send out one
   subscription for only one next Notification instead of the original
   logic (that receives all the Notifications).  Similar to the flow and
   congestion control in query/response, the receivers can now maintain
   a congestion window to control the amount of traffic coming from
   upstream.

   Here, instead of maintaining a (name, outgoing face) pair in FIB (or
   subscription table), the routers now adds a third field --
   accumulated count -- for each entry.  The accumulated count is
   increased by 1 on receiving such a subscription and decreased by 1 on
   sending a Notification to that face.  The routers should also
   propagate the maximum accumulated count upstream till the 1st hop
   router of the provider (or the rendezvous point in the network).  The



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   subscribers sends a subscription for every successfully received
   notification.  Here we also assume that, the subscribers operate
   based on the AIMD scheme.

   If the dissemination of Notification follows a tree topology in the
   network, we define the branching point of a receiver R (BP_R) as the
   router closest to R which has another outgoing face that can receive
   data faster than R.  For receivers that has bandwidth/resources to
   receive all the data from the provider, BP_R is the 1st hop router of
   the provider (or the rendezvous point).

   In this solution, we can prove that there is a feedback loop between
   each receiver and its branching point.  Therefore, when a receiver
   maintains its congestion window size using AIMD, the traffic between
   the branching point and the receiver is similar to TCP.  It can get a
   fair share at the bottleneck on the path, even if the bottleneck is
   not directly under the branching point.  In the multicast tree, the
   solution can ensure the fairness with other (TCP-like) flows on each
   branch.

   The solution can thus allow the sender to send at an application-
   efficient rate rather than being affected by the slowest receiver
   like pgmcc [16].

   It is true that the solution requires more packets and more states in
   the network compared to the basic notification solution, but the cost
   is similar to (and smaller than) that of query/response.  Since we
   are using one notification per subscription pattern, the amount of
   traffic overhead is the same as query/response.  As for the states
   stored in the router, the solution only requires 1 entry per prefix
   per face, which is smaller than the query/response which requires 1
   entry per packet per face.  Therefore, the overhead of the solution
   is acceptable in CCN.

8.1.2.2.1.  Other Challenges

   o  Sender Rate Control: The sender in the solution does not have to
      limit the sending rate to the slowest receiver to maintain network
      friendliness.  Therefore, the choice of sending rate is a tradeoff
      between network traffic and session completion time.  In the case
      where the application does not require a certain sending rate
      (like file transfer), the sender can align the sending rate to the
      slowest receiver (similar to pgmcc) to minimize the repair
      traffic, but at the cost of longer session completion time.  He
      can also send at the rate of the fastest receiver and try to get
      peer repair in the network.  This allows faster receivers finish
      the session earlier but causing higher network traffic due to the
      repair.  An ACKer-based solution similar to pgmcc can be adopted



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      to allow the sender align the rate at a proportion of users (e.g.,
      top 30%).  The sender can collect feedback (throughput, latency,
      etc.) from all the receivers periodically and pick an ACKer
      according to the proportion it desires.  On receiving a
      Notification packet, the ACKer would send an ACK just like TCP.
      The sender can maintain a congestion window also like TCP.  The
      feedback loop between the sender and the ACKer can align the
      sending rate at the ACKers's available bandwidth.

   o  Receiver Window Control: Slightly different from one-sender one-
      receiver window control in TCP, the sending rate in the hybrid
      approach is not controlled by any of the receivers.  Receiving
      intermittent packets can indicate both congestion (similar to TCP)
      and not enough window size (since the sending rate is higher).  In
      the first case, the receiver should reduce the window size while
      in the second case, the receiver should increase the window size.
      An indication of congestion (e.g., Random Early Detection, RED)
      should be provided directly from the network.The receivers with
      available bandwidth higher than the sending rate would have too
      large window size since it does not see any packet loss.  Please
      refer to [18] for a detailed solution on this issue.

8.1.3.  Receiver Reliability

   The receiver would miss packets when the available bandwidth/resource
   of the receiver is lower than the sending rate of the Notification
   provider.  Some applications (like gaming and video conferencing) can
   tolerant such kind of packet loss while the others (like file
   transfer) cannot.  Therefore, another module that ensures the
   reliability is needed.  However, reliability should be separated from
   the flow and congestion control since it is not a universal
   requirement.

   With the solution described in the receiver-driver or the hybrid
   approach, the slower consumers would receive intermittent packets
   since the sending rate can be faster than their fair share.  The
   applications that require reliable transfer can query the missing
   packets similar to the normal query/response.  This also requires
   that each content in the Notifications should have a unique Content
   Name (or hash in the nameless scenario).  The clients should also be
   able to detect the missing packets either based on the sequence
   number or based on a pre-acquired meta-file.  Caching in CCN can be
   leveraged to achieve availability and reliability.

   The network can forward the requests (Interests) of the missing
   packets towards the data provider, the other consumers and/or the in-
   network cache to optimize the overall throughput of the consumers.
   This solution is similar to Scalable Reliable Multicast (SRM [19]).



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   However, as mentioned in [20], solutions like SRM requires the
   consumers communicate directly with each other and therefore lose the
   privacy and trust.  CCN can ensure the privacy since the providers
   cannot get the information of the identity of the consumers.  Trust
   (data integrity) is also maintained with the signature in the Data
   packets.

8.2.  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.

   o  Stateless forwarding: In this case the notification only relies on
      the CCN FIB state to route the notification.  The FIB entries are
      populated through a routing control plane, which distinguishes the
      FIB states for the notification service from the content fetching
      FIB entries.  Through this logical separation, Notifications can
      be routed by matching its name with the matching FIB policy in the
      CCN forwarder, hence processed as notification multicast.

   o  Stateful forwarding: In this case, specific subscription state is
      managed in the forwarder to aid notification delivery.  This is
      required to scale notifications at the same time apply
      notification policies, such as filter notifications or to improve
      notification reliability and efficiency to subscribing users [8].

8.3.  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.



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8.4.  Use Case Scenarios

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

8.4.1.  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.



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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.

   [13]       Shang, W., Bannis, A., Liang, T., and Z. Wang, "Named Data
              Networking of Things.", IEEE IoTDI 2016, 2016.




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   [14]       Floyd, S. and F. Kevin, "Promoting The Use of End-to-End
              Congestion Control in The Internet.", IEEE ToN vol. 7(4),
              pp. 458-472, 1999.

   [15]       Widmer, J. and M. Handley, "TCP-Friendly Multicast
              Congestion Control (TFMCC): Protocol Specification.", IETF
              RFC 4654, 2006.

   [16]       Rizzo, L., "pgmcc: A TCP-Friendly Single-Rate Multicast
              Congestion Control Scheme.", SIGCOMM CCR vol. 30.4, pp.
              17-28, 2000, 2000.

   [17]       McCanne, S., Jacobson, V., and M. Vetterli, "Receiver-
              driven Layered Multicast.", SIGCOMM CCR pp. 117-130, 1996.

   [18]       Chen, J., Arumaithurai, M., Fu, X., and KK. Ramakrishnan,
              "SAID: A Control Protocol for Scalable and Adaptive
              Information Dissemination in ICN.", arXiv vol. 1510.08530,
              2015.

   [19]       Floyd, S., Jacobson, V., Liu, C., McCanne, S., and L.
              Zhang, "A Reliable Multicast Framework for Light-Weight
              Sessions and Application Level Framing.", IEEE TON vol.
              5(6), pp. 784-803, 1997.

   [20]       Floyd, N., Grossglauser, M., and KK. Ramakrishnan,
              "Distrust and Privacy: Axioms for Multicast Congestion
              Control.", Distrust and Privacy: Axioms for Multicast
              Congestion Control NOSSDAV, 1999.

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



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   Syed Obaid Amin
   Huawei Technologies
   2330 Central Expressway
   Santa Clara, CA  95050
   USA

   Email: obaid.amin@huawei.com


   Jiachen Chen
   Winlab, Rutgers University
   671, U.S 1
   North Brunswick, NJ  08902
   USA

   Email: jiachen@winlab.rutgers.edu


   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

















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