As a research project supported jointly by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan and the European Commission under its 7th Framework Program, the GreenICN Project has been in operation from 2013 to 2016. The GreenICN project focused on two typical application scenarios, one a disaster scenario and the other a video delivery scenario. The disaster scenario assumed a situation of limited resources, and the video delivery scenario assumed a situation of large-scale content delivery. In both situations, the project challenged to provide “green”, i.e. energy-efficient, content delivery mechanism. For this goal, we designed an energy consumption model to lay out energy reduction policies. For the achievement of the policies, we improved ICN architecture, for example a name-based publish/subscribe mechanism, an effective cache management policy,energy-efficient security scheme and a new energy API. This paper provides a summary of our achievements and descriptions of some outcome.

Information-centric networking (ICN) has been positioned for a number of years as a possible replacement to the IP-based Internet architecture with key promises in terms of network efficiency, privacy, security and novel applications. However, such wholesale replacement of the IP-based Internet through a new routing and service infrastructure has always been marred by the difficulties to gain adoption through existing stakeholders and market players, particularly solution providers. In this paper, we provide an evolutionary approach to introducing ICN in the real world by positioning an ICN-based solution as a routing-as-a-service offering for existing IP-based solutions. With this, we enable the expected benefits of ICN for the existing service and application basis of the current Internet. We will outline how we achieve this evolutionary introduction and how existing IP as well as HTTP-based services will be realized. An introduction into our gateway platform will be given, while also outlining first results from a recent showcase deployment.

Energy efficiency is an important requirement to forth-coming NDN (Named Data Networking) networks and caching inherent to NDN is a main driver of energy reduction in such networks. This paper addresses the research question “Does caching really reduce the energy consumption of the entire network?”. To answer the question, we precisely estimate how caching reduces energy consumption of forth-coming commercial NDN networks by carefully considering configurations of NDN routers. This estimation reveals that energy reduction due to caching depends on energy-proportionality of NDN routers.

Information-centric networking (ICN) has been investigated as a new communication model that is optimal for data registration and retrieval. A promising application of ICN is mobile machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in which data are registered by M2M terminals, such as vehicles, and retrieved by other M2M terminals. One of the most difficult challenges with ICN is achieving data mobility in which the data are registered by moving terminals and the location of the data changes constantly. To gain access to moving data, the data retrieval messages must access the routing information, which results in a high volume of message transaction loads of high-tier nodes such as the name resolution nodes. We previously proposed a scheme called data-centric network (DCN), which mitigates this problem by allocating multiple intermediate nodes that act as route aggregation points and by establishing optimized routes. In this paper, we compare the transaction load of DCN with those of conventional ICN schemes using theoretical evaluation based on probability calculation. We also compare the amount of route information and transaction loads using a simulator against binary tree and ISP backbone topologies. From these evaluations, we clarify the characteristics of each ICN scheme in different terminal distribution and communication patterns and show that DCN reduces the transaction loads of high-tier nodes when the terminals are communicating locally.

Communication infrastructures under the influence of the disaster strike, e.g., earthquake, will be partitioned due to the significant damage of network components such as base stations. The communication model of the Internet bases on a location-oriented ID, i.e., IP address, and depends on the DNS (Domain Name System) for name resolution. Therefore such damage remarkably deprives the reachability to the information. To achieve robustness of information retrieval in disaster situation, we try to apply CCN/NDN (Content-Centric Networking/Named-Data Networking) to information networks fragmented by the disaster strike. However, existing retransmission control in CCN is not suitable for the fragmented networks with intermittent links due to the timer-based end-to-end behavior. Also, the intermittent links cause a problem for cache behavior. In order to resolve these technical issues, we propose a new packet forwarding scheme with the dynamic routing protocol which resolves retransmission control problem and cache control scheme suitable for the fragmented networks. Our simulation results reveal that the proposed caching scheme can stably store popular contents into cache storages of routers and improve cache hit ratio. And they also reveal that our proposed packet forwarding method significantly improves traffic load, energy consumption and content retrieval delay in fragmented networks.

Content-centric networking (CCN) is an emerging networking architecture that is being actively investigated in both the research and industrial communities. In the latest version of CCN, a large number of interests have to be issued when large content is retrieved. Since CCN routers have to search several tables for each incoming interest, this could cause a serious problem of router workload. In order to solve this problem, this paper introduces a novel strategy of “grouping” multiple interests with common information and “packing” them to a special interest called the list interest. Our list interest is designed to co-operate with the manifest of CCN as its dual. This paper demonstrates that by skipping and terminating several search steps using the common information in the list interest, the router can search its tables for the list interest-based request with dramatically smaller complexity than the case of the standard interest-based request. Furthermore, we also consider the deployment of list interests and design a novel TCP-like congestion control method for list interests to employ them just like standard interests.

We introduce a novel cache replacement policy to improve the entire network performance of video delivery over content-centric networking (CCN). In the case of the CCN structure, we argue that: 1) for video multiplexing scenario, general cache strategies that ignore the intrinsic linear time characteristic of video requests are unable to make better use of the cache resources, and 2) it is inadequate to simply extend the existing research conclusions of file-oriented popularity to chunk-by-chunk popularity, which are widely used in CCN. Unlike previous works in this field, the proposed policy in this study, named two-level popularity-oriented time-to-hold cache replacement policy (TLP-TTH), is designed on the basis of the following principles. Firstly, the proposed cache replacement strategy is customized for video delivery by carefully considering the essential auto-correlated request feature of video chunks within a video file. Furthermore, the popularity in video delivery is subdivided into two levels, namely chunk-level access probability and file-level popularity, in order to efficiently utilize cache resources. We evaluated the proposed policy in both a hierarchical topology and a real network based hybrid topology, and took viewers departure into consideration as well. The results validate that for video delivery over CCN, TLP-TTH policy improves the network performance from several aspects. In particular, we observed that the proposed policy not only increases the cache hit ratio at the edge of the network but the cache utilization at the intermediate routers is also improved markedly. Further, with respect to the video popularity variation scenario, the cache hit ratio of TLP-TTH policy responds sensitively to maintain efficient cache utilization.

This paper proposes an NDN-based message delivery protocol over a cellular network in disasters. Collaborative communication among cellular devices is integrated into the protocol so that power consumed by battery-operated base stations (BSs) is reduced when a blackout occurs. A key idea is to reduce consumed radio resources by making cellular devices of which radio propagation quality are better forward messages of neighboring devices. The radio resource reduction contributes to reducing power consumed by a battery-operated BS. We empirically and analytically evaluate how the proposed message delivery protocol reduces the power consumption of a BS assuming a densely populated shelter.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) technology has recently been attracting substantial interest in the research community as one of the most promising future Internet architectures. The Named Data Networking (NDN) approach, which is one of the most recent instantiations of the ICN approach, would be a good choice for multimedia services, because NDN utilizes in-network storage embedded in NDN routers by caching recently or frequently requested contents. It is important to determine which data to cache at which NDN routers in order to achieve high performance, by considering not only the popularity of contents but also the inter-chunk popularity of a content item. This paper presents a chunk-block-based incremental caching scheme that considers both content and inter-chunk popularity. Our proposed scheme employs an incremental cache populating mechanism, which utilizes not only core-side but also edge-side NDN routers according to the request rate of the content item. Through simulations, we show that the proposed scheme achieves less delay, reduced redundant network traffic, and a higher cache hit ratio than legacy schemes.

In this work, we propose general, practical and accurate models to analyze the performance of multi-cache systems, in which a cache forwards its miss stream (i.e., requests which have not found the target item) to other caches. We extend a miss stream modeling technique originally known as Melazzi's approximation, which provides a simple but accurate approximate analysis for caches with cascade configurations. We consider several practical replication strategies, which have been commonly adopted in the context of ICN, taking into account the effects of temporal locality. Also, we capture the existing state correlations between neighboring caches by exploiting the cache eviction time. Our proposed models to handle traffic patterns allow us to go beyond the standard Poisson approximation under Independent Reference Model. Our results, validated against simulations, provide interesting insights into the performance of multi-cache systems with different replication strategies.

This paper presents a scheme that digitally cancels the unwanted phase components generated by the transmitter's laser and the receiver's local oscillator laser; such components place a substantial limit on the performance of coherent transceivers monolithically integrated with lasers in a photonic integrated circuit (PIC). Our cancellation proposal adopts the orthogonal polarization approach to provide a reference that is uncorrelated with the data signal. We elaborate on the principle of our proposal and its digital signal processing (DSP) algorithm. Experiments on a VCSEL with a linewidth of approximately 300MHz verify that our proposal can overcome the inherent phase noise limitations indicated by simulations and experiments. Our cancellation algorithm in conjunction with CMA-based polarization control is demonstrated and evaluated to confirm the feasibility of our proposal. The achievement of greatly relaxed laser linewidth will offer a significant benefit in offsetting the technical and cost requirements of coherent transceiver PICs with lasers. Therefore, our cancellation proposal is an enabling technology for the successful deployment of future coherent-based passive optical network (PON) systems.

The design and performance evaluation is presented of a partially adaptive array that suppresses clutter from low elevation angles in atmospheric radar observations. The norm-constrained and directionally constrained minimization of power (NC-DCMP) algorithm has been widely used to suppress clutter in atmospheric radars, because it can limit the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss to a designated amount, which is the most important design factor for atmospheric radars. To suppress clutter from low elevation angles, adding supplemental antennas that have high response to the incoming directions of clutter has been considered to be more efficient than to divide uniformly the high-gain main array. However, the proper handling of the gain differences of main and sub-arrays has not been well studied. We performed numerical simulations to show that using the proper gain weighting, the sub-array configuration has better clutter suppression capability per unit SNR loss than the uniformly divided arrays of the same size. The method developed is also applied to an actual observation dataset from the MU radar at Shigaraki, Japan. The properly gain-weighted NC-DCMP algorithm suppresses the ground clutter sufficiently with an average SNR loss of about 1 dB less than that of the uniform-gain configuration.

High peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and spectral leakage are two main problems of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. For alleviating the above problems, this paper proposes a joint model which efficiently suppresses both PAPR and spectral leakage, by combining serial peak cancellation (SPC) and time-domain N-continuous OFDM (TD-NC-OFDM) in an iterative way. Furthermore, we give an analytical expression of the proposed joint model to analyze the mutual effects between SPC and TD-NC-OFDM. Lastly, simulation results also support that the joint optimization model can obtain notable PAPR reduction and sidelobe suppression performance with low implementation cost.

In this paper, we investigate the degrees of freedom (DoF) of a MIMO cellular interfering network (CIN) with L (L≥3) cells and K users per cell. Previous works established the DoF upper bound of LK(M+N)/(LK+1) for the MIMO CIN by analyzing the interference alignment (IA) feasibility, where M and N denote the number of antennas at each base station (BS) and each user, respectively. However, there is still a gap between the DoF upper bound and the achievable DoF in existing designs. To address this problem, we propose two linear IA schemes without symbol extensions to jointly design transmit and receive beamforming matrices to align and eliminate interference. In the two schemes, the transmit beamforming vectors are allocated to different cluster structures so that the inter-cell interference (ICI) data streams from different ICI channels are aligned. The first scheme, named fixed cluster structure (FCS-IA) scheme, allocates ICI beamforming vectors to the cluster structures of fixed dimension and can achieve the DoF upper bound under some system configurations. The second scheme, named dynamic cluster structure IA (DCS-IA) scheme, allocates ICI beamforming vectors to the cluster structures of dynamic dimension and can get a tradeoff between the number of antennas at BSs and users so that ICI alignment can be applied under various system configurations. Through theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, we verify that the DoF upper bound can be achieved by using the FCS-IA scheme. Furthermore, we show that the proposed schemes can provide significant performance gain over the time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme in terms of DoF. From the perspective of DoF, it is shown that the proposed schemes are more effective than the conventional IA schemes for the MIMO CIN.

Reliable wireless communication often requires accurate knowledge of the underlying multipath channels. Numerous measurement campaigns have shown that physical multipath channels tend to exhibit a sparse structure. Conventional blind channel identification (BCI) strategies such as the least squares, which are known to be optimal under the assumption of rich multipath channels, are ill-suited to exploiting the inherent sparse nature of multipath channels. Recently, l₁-norm regularized least-squares-type approaches have been proposed to address this problem with a single parameter governing all coefficients, which is equivalent to maximum a posteriori probability estimation with a Laplacian prior for the channel coefficients. Since Laplace prior is not conjugate to the Gaussian likelihood, no closed form of Bayesian inference is possible. Following a different approach, this paper deals with blind channel identification of a single-input multiple-output (SIMO) system based on sparse Bayesian learning (SBL). The inherent sparse nature of wireless multipath channels is exploited by incorporating a transformative cross relation formulation into a general Bayesian framework, in which the filter coefficients are governed by independent scalar parameters. A fast iterative Bayesian inference method is then applied to the proposed model for obtaining sparse solutions, which completely eliminates the need for computationally costly parameter fine tuning, which is necessary in the l₁-norm regularization method. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the superior effectiveness of the proposed channel estimation algorithm over the conventional least squares (LS) scheme as well as the l₁-norm regularization method. It is shown that the proposed algorithm exhibits superior estimation performance compared to both LS and l₁-norm regularization methods.