Conditional subscription and notification in information centric networks
Lijun Dong, Guoqiang Wang · 2017
This paper proposes mechanisms to support basic, as well as conditional subscription/notification communication pattern in the Information Centric Networks (ICN), which still leverage and build on the ICN architecture and fundamental design principles with minimum change to the protocols. The proposed new interest message integrates content retrieve request, subscription and notification functions, and adds the conditions field which allow the consumers to specify the notification conditions for their subscribed content. Besides the forwarding face list to the producers for a named content, this paper proposes that the Forwarding Interest Base (FIB) also maintains the forwarding face list to the subscribers and associated notification conditions for the named content. This mechanism maintains the forwarding faces for a retrieval request message and for a notification message of the same named content in the same entry in the FIB. The subscription interest or notification interest does not need to be maintained in the PIT. The proposed mechanism embeds the notification multicast along the forwarding paths, which eliminates the unnecessary notification message delivery by unicast, reduces the notification latency experienced by each subscriber, and improves the network throughput. The conditions associated with each forwarding face to subscribers make sure that a notification message is only forwarded to the face if there were incoming subscription requests from consumers with matching conditions.