Maximum Concurrent Flow Solutions for Improved Routing in IoT Future Networks

Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-022-07479-w RESEARCH ARTICLE-COMPUTER ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE Maximum Concurrent Flow Solutions for Improved Routing in IoT Future Networks Abou-Bakr Djaker1 · Bouabdellah Kechar1 · Hossam Afifi2 · Hassine Moungla2,3 Received: 25 November 2021 / Accepted: 9 November 2022 © King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals 2022 Abstract Due to the advent of IoT and the increasing interest of billions of Internet users towards video contents, a huge multimedia flows has been generated, and as a consequence, a massive load is applied on the underlying core network. This change can affect the network stability and lead to potential performance degradation (such as congestion and delays). This is because multimedia flows are hungry in bandwidth, and also the classical routing protocols currently used in IoT core network (like OSPF) are not adapted yet to support the heavy and the large scale of multimedia traffics with a good quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we introduce the multicommodity-based routing by proposing two contributions, Maximum Concurrent Flow Protocol (MCFPr) and Cache-based Maximum Concurrent Flow (C-MCF). They are conceived based on the Maximum Concurrent Flow approach in order to optimize the routing of multimedia data in the backbone of IoT networks. Both contributions are studied and compared with the state-of-art approaches under different scenarios showing good results, especially in the number of data packets sent (improvement by 50%), and in the transmission time (50% faster compared to the majority), which makes them promising solutions for a rapid and efficient routing in IoT core networks. Keywords Internet of things · Maximum concurrent flow problem · Routing · Caching · Centrality · Named data networking 1 Introduction The fast development of IoT and data transmission protocols and technologies [1,2] has improved the human life in various fields (e.g., smart homes and cities, smart transportation, smart agriculture, e-health, and even for Hajj & Umrah [3]). Recently, the IoT has known an increasing interest towards multimedia contents (especially videos) through B Abou-Bakr Djaker Bouabdellah Kechar Hossam Afifi Hassine Moungla ; 1 Laboratoire RIIR, Département Informatique, Université Oran1 Ahmed Ben Bella, Oran, Algérie 2 UMR 5157, CNRS, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Télécom SudParis Saclay, Paris, France 3 Université de Paris, LIPADE, F-75006 Paris, France many emerging applications and services (such as smart IPTVs, Webinars, Video social media) that results in unprecedented huge multimedia traffics. This change brings many challenges as well, particularly in the bandwidth management and data routing [4], and can impact the performance in the IoT backbone network (in terms of congestion, delays, packets loss, etc.). This is because the multimedia services are high bandwidth-consuming, and the current IGP routing protocols (such as OSPF and RIP) cannot handle this enormous quantity of flow because they are originally designed for the Traditional Internet [5]. Since all IGP routing protocols use Ford–Fulkerson algorithm to find the maximum flow, only one flow (i.e., single commodity) is routed through the shortest-path even when there are a lot of data flows, they will be routed one by one. In this case, the bandwidth of the shortest path is not fully leveraged, and it takes a lot of time to send all the flows. In order to cope with the all aforementioned challenges, a promising approach called MCFP (Maximum Concurrent Flow Problem) [6] is used by our (two) contributions that are designed for the IoT core network (TCP/IP architecture): (i) MCFPr (Maximum Concurrent Flow Protocol) that is similar to OSPF but with optimized bandwidth management that 123 Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering (especially in WSN [8–10]). In this article, we target the routing in IoT core network. In this section, we present briefly the existed routing protocols designed for IP networks, then we discuss their constraints face to the evolving content requests. After that, we tackle two interesting approaches for computing the highest flow supported in the graph (i.e., Maximum Flow and Maximum Concurrent Flow Problems). 2.1 Routing Protocols Overview Fig. 1 The contributions of this paper allows sending many flows simultaneously, and (ii) C-MCF (Cache-based MCF) which is the improvement of the previous solution that has integrated the cache memory in order to increase the data availability and reduce the latency time, C-MCF is inspired from the ICN (Information-Centric Networks) [7]. Both contributions present a lot of advantages for the routing in IoT backbone (e.g., less data packets to send, short transmission time, optimal link utilization). Figure 1 gives a comprehensive illustration, the left intersection between the TCP/IP network and MCFP approach shows our two contributions presented in this paper. We will discuss about our future contributions (the right intersection) as perspectives later in Sect. 8. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2 overviews the existed IP routing protocols, and presents two major problems about flow maximization (i.e., MFP and MCFP) that are the basis of this paper. In Sect. 3, we introduce research works that are inspired by OSPF, the widely deployed routing protocol, and present also a recent stateof-the-art of MCFP. After that, we present the motivations behind the use of MCF approach as an original routing technique in IoT network in Sect. 4. We continue in the same section by explaining the scenario of the concurrent flows and its benefit for IoT. The contribution of this paper is twofold, we devote Sect. 5 to present and evaluate our first routing solution based on MCFP for the IoT networks, whereas the second contribution given in Sect. 7 is designed to improve the routing much more by integrating the mechanism of content caching within the nodes. The paper is then concluded in Sect. 8 followed by future perspectives. For the reason of scalability and processing performance, the Internet is composed of two types of network (intra- and inter-domains), each type has a specific routing protocol: IGP (Interior Gateway Protocol) designed for Autonomous Systems (ASs), and EGP (Exterior Gateway Protocol) used to link between ASs. Moreover, the IGP has two sub-categories: Distance Vector Routing (DVR) and Link-State based Routing (LSR), and both of them have their proper strategy to disseminate the routing information. The LSR is more privileged for large and complex networks than DVR because of many advantages [11]. The OSPF (Open Shortest-Path First) is a LSR protocol, it undergone a series of improvement [12,13], and it is the most efficient routing protocol deployed on the Internet for many decades. The contributions presented in this paper are inspired by this protocol. 2.2 Routing Protoc (...truncated)