When Flow Balance Backfires: The Traffic Surge from Reflexive Forwarding in ICNs

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promising networking architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT). Architectural elements such as in-network caching and content-based security can help communicate the vast amounts of content the IoT is expected to generate. Since the IoT exhibits several communication patterns distinct from the request-response interactions of ICNs, a draft standard called Reflexive Forwarding was discussed at the IETF. Reflexive Forwarding (RF) was proposed to address communications in the IoT, among other use cases. Although initially showing promising results, our investigations revealed that RF, when used in large-scale IoT deployments, was associated with quadratic growth in packet traffic. T his work highlights this problem by examining various aspects of ICN operation when employing RF for communications in the IoT.