Efficient content delivery in mobile ad-hoc networks using CCN

Abstract

Information-centric networking (ICN) is emerging as a future network technology. It has introduced the great advantage of information dissemination with low bandwidth consumption in wired testbed networks. Recently, ICN is also studied for mobile ad-hoc networks environments for efficient content distribution. In the existing works in the literature, broadcast delivery is actively utilized for designing new routing schemes since it seems well fitted to the nature of ICN conceptually. In this paper, we raise questions about this research direction by analysing the performance of reliability and energy efficiency of both broadcast and unicast delivery schemes. Our analysis shows that unicast delivery outperforms broadcast delivery, unless topological changes incur too much packet flooding overhead. Based on this observation, we present a novel energy efficient content distribution scheme that delivers the content in a unicast manner while minimizing flooding overhead by taking advantage of ICN features. Via ns-3 simulation, we compare the performance of the proposed scheme with that of other comparative schemes, and show that the proposed scheme achieves much higher reliability and energy efficiency in content distribution under mobile ad-hoc network environments.