iCast: Dynamic Information-Centric Cross-Layer Multicast for Wireless Edge Network

The native multicast support in Named Data Networking (NDN) is an attractive feature, as multicast content delivery can reduce the redundant traffic and improve the network performance, especially in the wireless edge network. With the awareness of content, NDN routers automatically aggregate the same requests from different end hosts and establish network-layer multicast. However, the current link-layer multicast based on host-centric MAC address management is inflexible. Consequently, supporting NDN dynamic multicast with the current link-layer architecture remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose iCast, short for dynamic information-centric multicast, to enable dynamic multicast in the link layer. Our work has three major contributions. First, iCast collaborates NDN native multicast with the host-centric link layer and meanwhile keeps the host-centric property of the current link layer. Second, iCast achieves per-packet dynamic multicast in the link layer and we further propose a hash-based iCast variant for dynamic connection. Third, iCast is implemented in real testbed and the evaluation results show that iCast reduces up to 59.53% traffic compared with vanilla NDN. iCast bridges the gap between NDN multicast and the host-centric link-layer multicast.