Ranged Name Retrieval: Design And Evaluation Of A Flexible Data Retrieval Approach For Icn

In Information-Centric Networking (ICN), applications request data based on the (exact) name of the data of interest. This poses a challenge for a growing number of applications, which do not know a priori the full name of a data object they seek, or do not necessarily need a specific data object, but are interested in a certain scope (e.g. the temperature in a particular geographical area). To address this challenge, we propose the more flexible and application-agnostic Ranged-Name Retrieval (RNR), which allows applications to define a range within each hierarchical component of the name they are requesting, obtaining in return one of the objects within that defined range. The performance evaluation of RNR indicates that, compared to the state of the art, it improves the bandwidth utilization efficiency 16-fold when retrieving data with unknown names, and even decreases the average end-to-end (E2E) delay for data delivery, while only adding 2% overhead for the processing of ranged-names.