InfoMax: An Information Maximizing Transport Layer Protocol for Named Data Networks

The advent of social networks, mobile sensing, and the Internet of Things herald an age of data overload, where the amount of data generated and stored by various data services exceeds application consumption needs. In such an age, an increasingly important need of data clients will be one of data sub-sampling. This need calls for novel data dissemination protocols that allow clients to request from the network a representative sampling of data that matches a query. In this paper, we present the design of a new transport-layer dissemination protocol, called InfoMax, that allows applications to request such a data sampling. InfoMax exploits the recently proposed named-data-networking (NDN) stack that makes networks aware of hierarchical data names, as opposed to IP addresses. Assuming that named objects with longer prefixes are semantically more similar, InfoMax has the property of minimizing semantic redundancy among delivered data items, hence offering the best coverage of the requested topic with the fewest bytes. The paper discusses the design of InfoMax, its experimental evaluation, and example applications.