OCEAN: Optional Capability-Based En Route Acknowledgement in Network Layer

High security and low latency are important in mission-critical data transmission, such as the end-to-end transmission in Industrial IoT (IIoT). However, existing schemes often struggle to simultaneously meet these demanding requirements due to hardware limitations and the lack of a packet lossless forwarding protocol in the network layer data plane. To address this challenge, we propose OCEAN (Optional Capability-based En route Acknowledgement in Network layer). OCEAN includes (1) an in-network caching hardware, which is a programmable Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) integrated with a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), and (2) a packet lossless forwarding protocol in the network layer data plane. In OCEAN, each packet was generated by an authorized end device, while each en route node verifies the packet, and caches it until receiving the acknowledgment from the next en route node. It incurs negligible latency to packet forwarding when there is no packet loss while retransmitting the packet at the en route node after a short timeout, which reduces the packet forwarding latency. Besides that, the per-packet verification guarantees that the adversary could not subvert the forwarding protocol. Our simulation in the BMv2 environment confirms its functionality, and the hardware implementation demonstrates that it can process packets at line rate with a total processing latency ranging from 2519 ns to 6160 ns, which is negligible in end-to-end transmission.