Enabling sender-initiated distributed applications and checkpointing in content centric networks

Abstract

Content Centric Network is a proposed future networking paradigm where data is the central entity for communication and the correspondence model follows two-step approach for data delivery. With increasing research in this domain, several new applications have been developed for CCN. However, the receiver-driven communication paradigm is unfavorable for several existing TCP/IP based distributed systems and would require extensive re-designing to support the proposed CCN architecture.

Checkpoint-restart is a widely used fault-recovery mechanism which saves the state of distributed system on a disk prior to a failure such that the system can restart from it. However, no prior work has been done till date to support checkpointing of distributed applications in CCN which is an absolute necessity if CCN is to be deployed on real-world infrastructure.

In this report, we present CCN Application Checkpoint (CCNAC) Tool, a plugin for checkpointing tool DMTCP, which enables checkpointing applications in CCN. We design and implement checkpointing algorithms to ensure consistent checkpoint-restart. We also propose a novel, efficient, application-layer based algorithm for sender-initiated communications based on proposed "pro-active naming" scheme in CCN. We design and evaluate test applications for our system on CCN testbed. Our proposed system is able to provide sender-initiated distributed computation with a nominal overhead of 28% and is able to checkpoint-restart both existing as well as proposed CCN distributed applications without much of communication overhead.