Swarm Routing in Information Centric Networks

The current Internet usage is changing, with an important increase in the consumption of content-based applications. However, the current host-based architecture is not prepared to integrate this amount of information. Therefore, novel proposals for the future Internet architecture are researched, as Information Centric Networks (ICN). ICN tries to shape the Internet architecture to the current Internet challenges by moving from the host-to-host model to a content-centric substitute. The survey on the related work shows how the routing techniques proposed to solve this subject take quite contrasting directions, from a deterministic link-state to a broadcast system. The literature review provides signs suggesting that Name Data Networking, a research project under ICN, might be able to adopt a swarm technique for the routing and forwarding planes due to the similarities between both concepts. Therefore, these techniques are thoroughly studied to present a design proposal implementing them, which applies the features from an ant-based system and complies with the NDN architecture. The system that evaluates the design is a simulator, implemented by means of several iterations of $design \circlearrowleft implementation$. The gathering of data comes from different experiments over two distinct topologies. The results certify the correct behavior of the system, operating as it is expected, and providing with interesting results. Moreover, the comparison between a flooding system with the ant-based design establishes a more fruitful outcome for the later in terms of content retrieved and path length. The contribution done by this Thesis is to provide an alternative with promising results to the currently employed routing techniques in the NDN field. hopefully, the solution presented may support further work in this line of research