Solving Selfish Content Routing in Route-by-NameInformation-Centric Network Architectures

Jiawei Li∗†, Hongbin Luo∗‡, Mingshuang Jin†, Shui Yu§ and Zhaoxu Wang††Beijing Jiaotong University, {15111049,14111039,zxwang}@bjtu.edu.cn, ‡Beihang University, luohb@buaa.edu.cn,

§University of Technology Sydney, shui.yu@uts.edu.au

Abstract—Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promis-ing network paradigm for the future Internet. As in the currentInternet, selfish routing is also crucial problem in ICN. To thebest of our knowledge, however, the selfish routing problem inICN is remaining an unresolved challenge. To fill this gap, in thispaper we propose a Nash Bargaining based content registration(NBREG) method, which is used for register content names(dissemination of content reachability information) from the gametheoretic perspective. NBREG allows neighboring domains tocooperate with each other without revealing their internal privateinformation. Based on results from real (inter-domain topology)trace simulations and prototype implementations, we show thatneighboring domains can obtain more benefits with NBREG thanthey register and forward contents selfishly.

I. INTRODUCTION

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has been recognizedas a promising future Internet paradigm and attracted plentyof interests from the academia and industry. Accordingly,many ICN architectures have been proposed, such as DONA,CCN/NDN [1] and CoLoR [2]. Instead of assigning IP ad-dresses to hosts/interfaces, ICN assigns a global unique nameto every piece of content (chunk). ICN adopts a receiver-drivencommunication model. To obtain a content, a consumer sendsout a request carrying the name of the content to the networkand the request is forwarded to a nearby node hosting thecontent. After that, the node returns the content by using Datapackets carrying the same name. The intermediate nodes alongthe forwarding path can cache the content to serve subsequentrequests for the same content.

Taking advantages of ICN, many issues can be addressed. Forexample, the in-network caching of ICN helps Internet ServiceProviders (ISPs) reduce content retrieval latency and improveusers’ Quality-of-Experience (QoE) [3], since a desired contentmay be retrieved from a nearby caching node instead of a re-mote content server. Similarly, in-network caching also reducesredundant transmission of contents, and helps ISPs reducecongestion and OPEX [4]. ICN also helps ISPs address themobility issue [5] and improve network security [6]. However,ICN still faces many challenges range from line-speed contentcaching, congestion control and Interest flooding attacks, tointer-domain routing protocols and traffic engineering issues.

This work was supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of Chinaunder Grant No. 18-163-21-QJ-002-018-01 and in part by the FundamentalResearch Funds for the Central Universities under Grant YWF-18-BJ-J-61.Corresponding Authors: Jiawei Li and Hongbin Luo.

Fig. 1. Illustration for content registration and selfish routing in ICN.

ICN researchers have proposed solutions for solving most ofthe above mentioned issues. For example, Feng et al. proposeda new content caching algorithm considering transit trafficcharge [4], Schneider et al. proposed a new congestion controlapproach in NDN [7] and Reed proposed to use the networkflow model to solve traffic engineering problem in ICN [8].

Today’s Internet is controlled by thousands of independentISPs that have their own interests, which introduces non-alignment economic objectives and competition behaviors be-tween independent ISPs. As such, the network will hide sensi-tive information and make selfish routing decisions. The selfishrouting problem is also existing in ICN and has been rarelystudied before. Instead of propagating reachability informationwith IP-prefixes, ICN propagates reachability information byadvertising content names. The advertisement of content namesand resolution process vary with ICN architectures and canbe roughly divided into two categories, stand-alone nameresolution and name-based routing approach [1]. The formerresolves content names into locators or identifiers on a logicalcentralized Name Resolution System (NRS) and then uses thelocators/identifiers to forward the content requests. The typicalarchitectures are DONA and CoLoR. The content registrationmessage is propagated from local NRS to parent/peer NRS, asshown in Fig. 1 (a). The latter combines the name resolutionwith requests routing as in CCN/NDN. It applies a link staterouting approach (similar to IP routing) and puts heavy burdenon routers [9]. To this end, some researchers proposed toapply NRS in CCN/NDN to address the scalability issues [10].Therefore, in this paper, we mainly focus on solving selfishrouting in the NRS based ICN architectures.

Fig. 1 (b) motivates our research by describing why neigh-boring ISPs need to cooperate when they advertise contentnames with each other. The providers of content C1, C2 and C3

978-1-5386-4727-1/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE

are located in ISP-A, ISP-B and ISP-C, respectively. Contentconsumers for C1, C2 and C3 are located in ISP-F, ISP-G, andISP-H, respectively. ISP-D and ISP-E can either be peers ora customer-provider pair, and they are interconnected by threeinter-domain links denoted by L11′ , L22′ , and L33′ . We assumethat ISP-D has already registered C1, C2 and C3 to ISP-E. Assuch, ISP-E knows it can reach the content through ISP-D.When a consumer in ISP-H sends a request for C1 to ISP-E,ISP-E faces the path selection problem since there are threelinks between ISP-D and ISP-E. From the perspective of ISP-E, it would select link L33′ to forward the request to give itscustomers the best services and QoE, since it is the closestegress point to ISP-H (e.g., 3 hops). However, ISP-D maywant ISP-E to forward the Interest through L11′ , since C1 isprovided by ISP-A and the shortest path from ISP-A to ISP-Eis using L11′ (e.g., 2 hops). From this example, we can seethat ISP-D and ISP-E have different preferences on choosingan inter-domain link for the request and data packets of C1.But as the trade-off choice here, selecting L22′ is the fair andPareto efficient choice for them. Since the total path length is4+4 = 8 hops, which is smaller than selecting L11′ (2+7 = 9hops) and selecting L33′ (7 + 3 = 10 hops). However, thereis no straightforward way to achieve the optimal inter-domainrouting, since ISP-D and ISP-E are both selfish.

To alleviate the content selfish routing problem in ICN, wepropose a cooperative content registration mechanism based onthe Nash Bargaining Solutions called NBREG. NBREG hasthree main advantages. First, it uses the well-known conceptof Nash Bargain [11]. Under this scheme, ISPs coordinatelyoptimize a social cost function, known as Nash product, tofind a Pareto efficient and fair outcome, which is also a “win-win” outcome for players. Second, NBREG can maintain ISPs’autonomy and cooperatively manage the inter-domain trafficwithout directly disclosing “sensitive internal information”.Third, NBREG can be easily deployed and integrated into mostof the ICN architectures, since it only needs to add several fieldsin the content registration messages and add the negotiationfunction on NRS of ICN. To the best of our knowledge,this is the first work to apply the Nash Bargaining Solution(NBS) to jointly optimize content registration and routing inICN environments. The main contributions of this paper aresummarized as follows.

1) The selfish routing problem is investigated for the firsttime in the context of ICN. Specifically, we proposeNBREG to solve the selfish routing problem in ICN.

2) We evaluate NBREG by using real-world Internet topol-ogy traces and implement it on a prototype to vali-date its feasibility and performance. The results showthat NBREG not only achieves mutual benefits betweenneighboring ISPs, but also has low computation overheadand bandwidth overhead.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In Sec. II,we introduce the state-of-the-art solutions of selfish routing inthe current Internet. In Sec. III, we describe NBREG in detail.In Sec. IV, we present the simulation details, implementation

Fig. 2. The network model. Fig. 3. Evaluation of routing choice.

details and the evaluation results of NBREG. Finally, weconclude the paper and present future work in Sec. V.

II. RELATED WORK

The selfish routing problem in the current Internet is verycritical and has been studied in [12]–[16]. Unfortunately, theseworks cannot be applied in ICN. First, the inter-domain routingin the current Internet is different from the ICN scenario.ISPs of the current Internet control inter-domain traffic by dis-tributing different IP-prefixes to each inter-domain link withoutknown the content corresponding to a specific IP-prefix. Thus,they cannot control the transmitted content directly. Second,ISPs in the current Internet cannot obtain the content charac-teristics (e.g., content size) at the network layer. However, thiscould be easily realized in ICN environment [17]. Third, thecontent registration in ICN naturally supports the cooperationbetween neighboring ISPs. Since the NRS in each domain couldbe used as negotiation agents for exchanging the preferencesof inter-domain links.

The work most similar to ours is presented in [16]. However,this work focuses on the flow splitting problem and is notsuitable for the content routing in ICN. The works in [18],[19] also focus on the topic of inter-domain contents routing inICN. However, they do not solve the selfish routing problem.The work in [20] proposed to propagate content names froman Autonomous Systems (AS) to another by using a protocolsimilar to Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). However, BGPmakes it hard for neighboring ASes to negotiate a best inter-domain path for each flow [12].

III. NETWORK MODEL

Consider a network model shown in Fig. 2, where there is alogically centralized (but may be physically distributed) NameResolution System (NRS) in each domain, such as the ResourceHandler in DONA [1], and Resource Manager in CoLoR [2].The names of all contents held by nodes in local networkare registered to the local NRS. The NRS then propagatesits registered content names (announces the reachability ofcontent) to the NRS in the other AS. This is known as contentregistration process of ICN. Instead of only registering thecontent names between each other, we propose that a contentname could be registered as the format of “CNk : PLi” inNBREG. CNk means the content name of the k-th contentand PLi means the “best” inter-domain path Li for forwardingCNk. For instance, in the example of Fig. 1, the “best” inter-domain path for forwarding C1 is L22′ . Conceptually, NBREGconsists of three steps.

1. Collecting and propagating content characteristics: Inan IP-prefixes negotiation based inter-domain routing schemein the current Internet, neighboring ISPs need to register thefeatures of a traffic flow before they negotiate the routingchoices of the flow. These features are including the signatureof a flow (e.g., the 5-tuples of an IP flow), the estimated sizeof a flow, the alternative routing options, and the expectedlifetime of a flow [15]. However, ICN provides an explicit flowdefinition (data packets carrying the same content name couldbe viewed as a flow) and can realize fine-grained flow controlcompared with the current Internet. This enables ISPs to collectcontent characteristics (e.g., content size) at the network layerrather than application layer [17]. Thus, ISPs can encapsulatethe content characteristics into the content registration messagesand avoid the extra information exchange compared with thecurrent Internet.

2. Computing the utilities of routing choices: The routingchoice is a specific inter-domain path, e.g., the topology in Fig.3 has three routing choices, P1, P2 and P3. Different ISPs havedifferent traffic engineering (TE) objectives, such as minimizingthe forwarding distance and minimizing the forwarding latency.An ISP can compute the utilities of different routing choicesaccording to its internal sensitive information (e.g., the topologyof the network and capacity of each link) and local TEobjective. Instead of propagating sensitive internal information,we consider that ISPs can exchange the utilities in a range of[Dmin, Dmax] to reflect their preferences to different routingchoices. The value of Dmin and Dmax could be negotiatedahead of time between ISP pairs. For example, in Fig. 3, theNRS of local network could collect the link latencies of localdomain. We assume that content C1, C2 and C3 come to theingress points R4, R1 and R2, respectively. Then, the NRScould easily find the “best” routing choice for forwarding eachcontent by using a shortest path algorithm. As shown in Fig. 3,the “best” routing choices for forwarding C1, C2 and C3 areP1, P2 and P3, respectively. We can also get the correspondingminimum latencies, i.e., 2 ms, 3 ms and 2 ms, for the ease ofdescription denoted by a vector ~Li.

However, we cannot directly use the minimum latencies~Li as the utilities, since neighboring ISPs may use differentmatrixes to evaluate the routing choices. For example, one ISPA uses latency while its neighbor B uses distance (in a unit ofhop). Therefore, we need a quantified normalization function totransform the latency or distance as the utilities in the range of[Dmin, Dmax], which could be further used in the computationof Nash product. The proposed normalization function is shownin Algorithm 1. ISPs can evaluate the utilities of routing choicesindependently. In general, the bigger the utility is, the moreprofits the ISP will obtain.

3. Compute the NBS outcome: We can build a Bargainingproblem by exchanging utilities of contents between neigh-boring ISP pairs. To ease the understanding of NBREG, webriefly introduce the Bargaining problem and Nash BargainingSolution (NBS) as follow.

The Bargaining Problem: It studies how two players share

Algorithm 1 Normalization FunctionInput: Evaluation vector ~Li, range of utilities θ(~Li) = [Dmin, Dmax].Output: Utilities vector ~Ui.1: Compute the average of ~Li:

µ =∑Ni=1

~LiN ;

2: Compute the standard deviation of ~Li:

σ(~Li) =

√∑Ni=1

(~Li−µ)2

N ;

3: Compute the raw utilities:~Ui raw(~Li) =

Dmax+Dmin2 +

µ−~Liσ(~Li)

· Dmax−Dmin2 ;

4: Do decimals of ~Ui raw(~Li) to round down numbers:~Ui(~Li) = bUi raw(~Li) +

12 c;

5: Map ~Ui(~Li) into θ(~Li):

~Ui = F(~Ui(~Li)) =

Dmax, ~Ui(~Li) ≥ DmaxDmin, ~Ui(~Li) ≤ Dmin~Ui(~Li), else.

(a) noncooperative (b) cooperative

Fig. 4. Feasible set of battle of sexes.

a surplus that they can be jointly generated. The set of allpossible bargaining agreements is called feasible sets. A bargainsolution is a point within the feasible set for both players.Each player has a range of preferences over different outcomes,and two players must reach an agreement, or neither side willget anything. In bargaining problems, it’s assumed that twoplayers can agree on some outcomes, and the question is whichoutcome is fair and efficient.

The NBS: We now explain how NBS is computed. Wedenote the feasible set as X , the utility function of player1as u, the utility function of player2 as v and the breakdownpoint as D = (d1, d2), where d1 and d2 are the gains thatplayer1 and player2 will get if their negotiation breaks down.Then, the NBS is the unique point that maximizes the product:

Max (u− d1)(v − d2),

where (u, v) ∈ X , u ≥ d1 and v ≥ d2. The feasible set Xis convex and bounded. All points on the boundary of thebargaining set are Pareto optimal. Players always would liketo settle at the Pareto optimal outcome. Since if they settle ata non-Pareto optimal outcome, there will be another outcomethat at least one player can improve its profit by hurting theinterests of another player.

NBS for the BoS: We can use the utilities exchangedbetween neighboring ISPs to build a bargaining game. Thepayoff matrix here is similar with payoff matrix of the Battleof Sexes (BoS). The battle of sexes is a coordination gamebetween a boy and a girl (payoff matrix is shown in Table I),who decide to watch either an opera or a football game. Ina noncooperative situation, there are two pure strategy Nashequilibria and one mixed strategy Nash equilibrium, i.e., Girl

Fig. 5. The negotiation of NBREG

TABLE ITHE BATTLE OF SEXES

GirlBoy Opera Football

Opera (4,1) (0,0)Football (0,0) (1,4)

chooses opera and football with a probability ( 45 ,15 ) and Boy

chooses opera and football with a probability ( 15 ,45 ). When they

choose to select the mixed strategy Nash equilibria, their gainswill be (u, v) = (45 ,

45 ). If they select their choices (i.e., opera

or football) with a probability ( 12 ,12 ), their gains will increase to

(u, v) = ( 54 ,54 ). Accordingly, the feasible set (shaded region)

of the noncooperative situation is shown in Fig. 4 (a). In acooperative situation, the players can communicate with eachother and reach an agreement before making their choices, theirfeasible set will be enlarged as shown Fig. 4 (b). Accordingly,the breakdown point is D = (d1, d2) = ( 45 ,

45 ). The feasible

set can be determined and the NBS model can be construct as:

Max (u− 45 )(v −

45 )

s.t. u+ v ≤ 5,u− 4v ≤ 0,u− 1

4v ≥ 0,u ≥ 4

5 , v ≥45 .

We can solve this optimization problem by using liner program-ming and find the NBS point is that both Boy and Girl choose(opera, opera) or (football, football) with probability ( 12 ,

12 ),

and the corresponding gain is ( 52 ,52 ).

NBS outcome of NBREG: The outcome has two cases.The first one is that the NBS outcome is just on a specificrouting choice. In this situation, ISPs can directly select theNBS outcome as the content registration path. The second caseis that the NBS outcome is not on a specific routing choice.In this situation, ISPs need to select the content registrationpath with certain probability. This probability can be computedaccording to the concept of coordinated mixed equilibrium. Forexample, we denote the expected payoff metric of ISP-A asK1(M ) and the expected payoff metric of ISP-2 as K2(M).We also denote the utility metric of ISP-1 as A = {αij} andthat of ISP-2 as B = {βij}, the probability metric as M ={µij}. Then we can compute the probability according to theformulations below:

K1(M) =∑ij

αijµij ,

K2(M) =∑ij

βijµij ,

µMω = 1,M ≥ 0,

µ = (1, ..., 1) ∈ Rm,ω = (1, ..., 1) ∈ Rn.

From the perspective of geometry, the probabilities also meansthe distance between the NBS and the pure strategy outcome

Fig. 6. Topology of the prototype.

in the feasible set.The negotiation process: The negotiation process is shown

in Fig. 5. We still take Fig. 2 as an example. ISP A firstsends a negotiation request to inform ISP B that it wants toregister a new content c1. The content characteristics and theutilities (~U c1i (A)) of ISP A are also included in negotiationrequest message. After B receives the negotiation request, it willcompute its utilities (~U c1i (B)) of routing choices according tothe content characteristics and sends ~U c1i (B) to ISP A. AfterISP A receives ~U c1i (B), it computes the registration path byusing the NBS method and sends the result as a feedback to B.After B receives this feedback message, it will confirm and sendan ACK to acknowledge the receipt of the feedback message,and register this content to local NRS.

IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

Below we present the implementation and evaluation resultsof NBREG to show: 1) the differences of “total gains” betweenNBREG and the optimal method compared with the defaultselfish method (the total gains means the sum of gains oftwo neighboring ISPs); 2) the differences of individual gainsbetween NBREG and the optimal routing compared with thedefault selfish method (the individual gains means the gainsof each ISP); 3) the relationship between total gains andthe network topology; 4) the relationship between contentregistration frequency and system overhead, as well as therelationship between the number of inter-domain links and thenegotiation delay.

A. Simulation

The simulation is running on a self-developed simulatorwith Python. As for the input data, we use Rocketfuel ISPs[21] maps, which contains hundreds of PoP-level connectivityinformation and each ISP is constructed by several PoP cities.The links in Rocketfuel maps are annotated with propagation la-tencies. The Rocketfuel trace also contains the estimated intra-domain link weights and the peering locations of neighboringISPs. The raw trace has 67 ISPs and 409 ISP pairs. As theevaluations of selfish routing in the current Internet [12]–[16],we evaluate NBREG in the case of two neighboring ISPs (Fig.2). To this end, we select 54 ISPs and 213 ISP pairs, whichhave more than three inter-domain links. We only carry outunidirectional registration experiments (i.e., the contents areregistered from the left ISP to the right ISP in Fig. 2), sincethe gains is irrelevant with the content registration direction.For the ease of description, we call the registration initiator

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Fig. 7. Illustration of the total gains in specific ISP pairs.

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Fig. 8. Illustration of the relationship between total gains and ISP topology.

as Left ISP and the registration receiver as the Right ISP inthe rest of this paper.

The gains of routing choice is defined as the improvementof utilities. In the simulation, the utilities of routing choicesare computed according to the latency, which can be obtainedfrom the Rocketfuel dataset. In addition, we assume thatthe optimization objective of both ISP pairs is to minimizethe forwarding latency of the content. We view traffic fromdifferent content sources to content consumers as differentcontent flows. For example, ISP 1 and ISP 209 are neighboringISP pairs in the dataset. We assume the providers of contentc1 are in the PoP-city Ashburn, VA of ISP 1 and assume thecontent consumers for c1 are in every PoP-city points of ISP209. Accordingly, we view traffic form Ashburn, VA in ISP 1to different PoP-cities in ISP 209 as different content flows.

We compute the utilities of routing choices (i.e., inter-domain links) by using three methods. The first method is aselfish method (SM), where ISPs are acting selfish behaviorand selecting inter-domain links for maximizing each ISP’sown utilities, like early-exist routing and hot-potato routingin the current Internet. The neighboring ISPs are not sharingany information (i.e., network topology, link weights and thelink latencies information). The second method is the optimalmethod (OM), where ISPs are sharing their internal privacyinformation. The last method is NBREG, where neighboringISPs only reveal fuzzy utilities information for reflecting theirpreferences about the inter-domain routing choices. Finally, wecompute the relative gain as the indicator of the performance,where the relative gain means utility difference normalizedwith the utilities of the default selfish method. By comparingNBREG with SM, we can evaluate the benefits brought byNBREG. Besides, by comparing NBREG with OM, we canevaluate the gap with the optimal situation.

B. Implementation

To evaluate the overhead of NBREG, we build a prototypeby using Intel DPDK and the CLICK modular router. Thehardware is using ATCA-9300, which is equipped with 8 GBmemory and 4 core Intel Xeon E3 1275V2 processors. Thetopology of our prototype is shown in Fig. 6. We implementthe content provider and the content consumer by using theCLICK modular router and the NRS by using DPDK, each ofthem is developed with thousands of lines of C/C++ codes.We encapsulate the content size into the content registrationmessage, which is issued by the content provider. Besides,we assume that the packet length is 1500 bytes. When theserver receives an Interest, it generates a series of data packetsaccording to the content size. The number of data packetsis calculated by using the content size divided by 1500. Wemeasure the computation overhead and the bandwidth overheadof NBREG on the prototype. The results are shown in the nextsubsection.

C. Evaluation Results

1) Total gains of NBREG and OM: We analyze the CDF oftotal gains of NBREG and OM on 213 ISP pairs of Rocketfuel.Fig. 9 shows the CDF of average of the total gains. From theresults, we observe that the total gains of NBREG is very closeto the OM. In particular, from Fig. 9, we observe that almost99% of 213 ISP pairs can obtain benefits from using NBREG,and nearly 50% of the ISP pairs can get more than 10% gainswhen compared to the SM. This implies that NBREG canachieve win-win outcomes between neighboring ISP pairs anddoes not lose too much compared to the OM.

Due to the limitation of paper length, we cannot show all theevaluation results of total gains for NBREG and OM of all 213ISP pairs. Instead, we show four representative results as shownin Fig. 7 (a)-(d). From the simulation results, we observe thatthe total gains vary with the change of ISP pairs. For example,in the ISPs 2686 and 7018 (Fig. 7 (a)), the maximum value

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Fig. 11. The implementation results of negotiationdelay.

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Fig. 13. Bandwidth overhead.Fig. 14. The Number of IP address Changing events ofthe top 1 million popular web sites in Tier-1 ASes.

of gains can be obtained from using NBREG and OM is 8%.This indicates that the benefits of using NBREG and OM forISP 2686 and 7018 are low, which means that the “price ofanarchy” is low for them. Accordingly, they may route contentselfishly in practice rather than negotiate and cooperative witheach other. However, for ISP 209 and ISP 4006 (Fig. 7 (b))and ISP 1239 and ISP 6453 (Fig. 7 (c)), the maximum valueof the gain is nearly 45% and 80%, respectively. It indicatesthat the “price of anarchy” is very high for them. If they do notcooperate with each other and insist the selfish behavior, theywill pay a high price and lose lots of gains. Another exampleis ISPs 209 and 4006 (Fig. 7 (b)), there are nearly 78% of thecontent flows cannot get benefits from using NBREG. But forISP pairs 1299 and 6453 (Fig. 7 (d)), only 30% of the contentflows cannot get benefits from using NBREG.

2) The relationship between total gains and topology:We now explain why above differences exist. We considerthat different ISP pairs can obtain different benefits fromcooperation is due to the diversity of ISP topologies. As shownin Fig. 8 (a)-(d). In the first example shown in Fig. 8 (a), thegain of NBREG and OM are all zero, which means they cannotobtain any benefits from the cooperation. We then analyze thetopology of ISP 12050 and ISP 2914. Interestingly, we findthat although there are 3 inter-domain paths between them, thetopology of ISP 12050 is very simple (Fig.8(b)). There are onlythree PoPs in ISP 12050 and each of the PoPs has an inter-domain path connecting to ISP 2914. Thus, there is no need tonegotiate with ISP 2914, since no matter which city the contentprovider locates in, the best registration and forwarding choiceis using SM and select the closest inter-domain path.

Another example is Fig. 8 (c), where we observe thatNBREG brings no benefits than SM. This is also caused bythe diversity of network topology. The topology of ISP 4006is shown in Fig. 8 (d). From our analysis, we find that all theinter-domain paths of ISP 4006 are connected with the PoP

city San Francisco, CA, which means San Francisco, CA isthe only one egress point from ISP 4006 to ISP 4565. Thus,NBREG cannot bring any benefits when compared with theselfish method. Even though we find out that there are somerelationship between the total gains and the ISP topologies,we have not figured out what’s the main characteristics of thetopologies that affecting the total gains. It may be influencedby the connectivity of the topology and the degree of the nodes.In general, the more inter-domain paths connecting ISP pairs,the more benefits they will obtain from cooperation. We willexplore this in our future work.

3) Individual gains of NBREG and OM: We next presentthe individual gains of neighboring ISP pairs. In OM, the LeftISP knows all the internal information of the Right ISP, it willaccept the registration and routing choices with suboptimal util-ities, since the suboptimal choice can achieve the global optimalutilities. Fig. 10 shows the CDF of the average individual gainsacross 213 ISP pairs. From this figure, we can see that thedotted line is above the solid line in the upper part of Fig.10 (Left ISPs). This implies that the average gain of the OMis lower than NBREG in the Left ISPs of all 213 ISP pairs.This is reasonable since the optimal methods will choose therouting choice whose utility is lower than the default SM forachieving the global maximal utility. However, in NBREG, theLeft ISPs only chooses the outcome whose utility is larger thanthe default SM.

In the lower part of Fig. 10 (Right ISPs), the average gainsof OM is significantly larger than that of NBREG. By jointlyconsidering the Fig. 10 and Fig. 9, we conclude that if oneISP could give up some utilities to select a suboptimal routingchoice, the total utilities will be significantly improved. Thus,it is necessary for neighboring ISP pairs to negotiate andcooperate with each other in the content routing precess.

4) Negotiation delay and overheads: The overheads ofNBREG are measured from real prototype. Specifically, the

negotiation delay and the computation overhead are measuredas shown in Fig. 11-13. In our experiments, the number ofinter-domain links are increased from 2 to 10. Each experimentis repeated 1000 times. Fig. 11 point out that the negotiationoverhead will increase along with the increasing of inter-domain links. When the number of inter-domain links is 10,the average negotiation delay of NBREG is 273 milliseconds,which means that for an ISP pair with 10 inter-domain links,they can negotiate and register nearly 3663 new contents persecond. If the inter-domain links between ISP-pairs is 5, theISP pairs can register 4167 new contents per second.

Fig. 12 and 13 show the computation overhead and band-width overhead of NBREG on the NRS. Every experiment isrepeated with different content registration frequencies. Fig. 12and 13 show that when the registration frequency is 8,000,the CPU utilization of NRS will increase to 16.1% and thebandwidth overhead will increase to 1303 KBytes per second.Note that these overheads are measured on our RMs whosecomputation capabilities are not very high (i.e., one core CPUfrequency is 3.500 GHz). Thus, the computation complexity ofdeploying NBREG is acceptable if we use a high performancecommercial server as NRS, not to mention the using distributedserver farms or small data centers as NRS.

However, there is no need to negotiate all the contentsbetween neighboring ISPs. Similar to the current Internet, wethink there will be “elephant” contents (contents with large sizeor high popularity) and “mice” contents in ICN [22]. We canonly use NBREG for “elephant” contents and use default SMfor “mice” contents. This will obviously decrease the overheadof NBREG. For evidence, we explore the IP address changingevents (the IP address of web site moving from one AS toanother AS) of the top 1 million popular web sites on Alexa[23]. Interestingly, the average number of IP address changingevents of the top 1 million popular web site in tier-1 ASesis only 9306.6 times per day (Fig. 14). It is reasonable toconsider IP address changing events of web sites will causecontent registrations in ICN. Then, we conclue that the contentregistrations are not very frequent when we only use NBREGfor popular content, which further makes NBREG feasible.

V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

In this paper, we propose NBREG, a cooperative contentregistration approach for solving the selfish routing problemin ICN. With NBREG, neighboring ISPs can cooperate witheach other to route inter-domain content traffic without re-vealing their internal sensitive information. Based on bothreal inter-domain topology traces simulations and prototypeimplementations, we show that NBREG brings mutual benefitsto neighboring ISPs. Accordingly, the bandwidth cost andcomputation cost of NBREG are low, which makes it possiblefor ISPs to deploy NBREG in practice. However, due to thelimited space, we do not consider the in-network caching ofICN in this paper, although we have realized that the cachingwill influence the preferences of routing choices for content.We will consider the caching effects in the future work.

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