A Survey of Information-Centric Networking (Draft)

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2010

The current Internet architecture focuses on communicating entities, largely leaving aside the information to be exchanged among them. However, trends in communication scenarios show that WHAT is being exchanged becoming more important than WHO are exchanging information. Van Jacobson describes this as moving from interconnecting machines to interconnecting information. Any change of this part of the Internet needs argumentation as to why it should be undertaken in the first place. In this position paper, we identify four key challenges, namely information-centrism of applications, supporting and exposing tussles, increasing accountability, and addressing attention scarcity, that we believe an information-centric internetworking architecture could address better and would make changing such crucial part worthwhile. We recognize, however, that a much larger and more systematic debate for such change is needed, underlined by factual evidence on the gain for such change.

Can the Internet be redesigned to reduce future conflicts? The Internet's underlying architecture, Internet Protocol (IP), was introduced in 1974. Since then many ideas have been put forward about how to update and improve it. One branch of these is called "Information-Centric Networking" (ICN). Trossen and Kostopoulos note how ICN could improve the ability of the Internet to resolve conflicts between the various constellations of stakeholder interests, conflicts that they call "tussles." Introducing a "tussle taxonomy," they provide examples of how tussles might be resolved differently in ICN. They believe the ICN model would help rationalize pricing in a three-sided market; reduce congestion and transit costs; provide more transparency; offer more choices and possible outcomes with respect to issues such as privacy, intellectual property, and data protection; and better enable not just present but future business models that actors within the system might strive to establish.

A large fraction of today's Internet applications are internally publish/subscribe in nature; the current architecture makes it cumbersome and inept to support them. In essence, supporting efficient publish/subscribe requires data-oriented naming, efficient multicast, and in-network caching. Deployment of native IP-based multicast has failed, and overlay-based multicast systems are inherently inefficient. We surmise that scalable and efficient publish/subscribe will require substantial architectural changes, such as moving from endpoint-oriented systems to information-centric architectures.

2008

The existing Internet ecosystem is a result of decades of evolution. It has managed to scale well beyond the original aspirations. Evolution, though, highlighted a certain degree of inadequacies that is well documented. In this position paper we present the design considerations for a re-architected global networking architecture which delivers dissemination and non-dissemination objects only to consenting recipients, reducing unwanted traffic, linking information producers with consumers independently of the hosts involved, and connects the digital with the physical world. We consider issues ranging from the proposed object identifier/locator split to security and trust as we transition towards a Network of Information and relate our work with the emerging paradigm of publish/subscribe architectures. We introduce the fundamental components of a Network of Information, i.e., name resolution, routing, storage, and search, and close this paper with a discussion about future work.

IEEE Communications Magazine, 2000

Proceedings of the 4th International Mobile Multimedia Communications Conference, 2008

This paper describes ideas and items of work within the framework of the EU-funded 4WARD project. We present scenarios where the current host-centric approach to information storage and retrieval is ill-suited for and explain how a new networking paradigm emerges, by adopting the information-centric network architecture approach, which we call Network of Information (NetInf). NetInf capitalizes on a proposed identifier/locator split and allows users to create, distribute, and retrieve information using a common infrastructure without tying data to particular hosts. NetInf introduces the concepts of information and data objects. Data objects correspond to the particular bits and bytes of a digital object, such as text file, a specific encoding of a song or a video. Information objects can be used to identify other objects irrespective of their particular digital representation. After discussing the benefits of such an indirection, we consider the impact of NetInf with respect to naming and governance in the Future Internet. Finally, we provide an outlook on the research scope of NetInf along with items for future work.

In an information-centric network, data objects have a cen-tral role. They are located based on their name, and accessed regardless of their location. The new paradigm helps overcome the limitations of the host-centric model, thereby offering a wide range of applications. How-ever, the Information-Centric Networking concept solicits decent tech-niques and architectures. In this paper, we propose an architectural de-sign for Information-Centric Networking. Our work is expected to con-tribute towards the overall development of the research area.

2016

Abstract. Current Future Internet (FI) research brings out the trend of designing information-oriented networks, in contrast to the current host-centric Internet. Information-centric Networking (ICN) focuses on finding and transmitting information to end-users, instead of connecting end hosts that exchange data. The key concepts of ICN are expected to have significant impact on the FI, and to create new challenges for all associated stakeholders. In order to investigate the motives as well as the arising conflicts between the stakeholders, we apply a tussle analysis methodology in a content delivery scenario incorporating socio-economic principles. Our analysis highlights the interests of the various stakeholders and the issues that should be taken into account by designers when deploying new content delivery schemes under the ICN paradigm.

Computer Communications, 2013

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a promising approach to networking that has the potential to provide better-more natural and more efficient-solutions for many of today's important communication applications including but not limited to large-scale content distribution. This article describes the Network of Information (NetInf) architecture-a specific ICN approach that targets global-scale communication and supports many different types of networks and deployments, including traditional Internet access/core network configurations, data centers, as well as challenged and infrastructure-less networks. NetInf's approach to connecting different technology and administrative domains into a single information-centric network is based on a hybrid name-based routing and name resolution scheme. In this article, we describe the most important requirements that motivated the NetInf design. We present an architecture overview and discuss the different architecture elements such as naming, message forwarding, caching, and a name resolution service (NRS) in detail. As efficient caching and a scalable NRS are two main success factors, we present an evaluation of both elements based on a theoretical analysis, complemental simulation results, and prototyping results. The results suggest that a scalable NRS for 10 15 and more objects with resolution latencies (well) below 100 ms is possible, implying that a global Network of Information that removes the need for today's application-specific overlay solutions is feasible.

—The current Internet architecture was founded upon a host-centric communication model, which was appropriate for coping with the needs of the early Internet users. Internet usage has evolved however, with most users mainly interested in ac-cessing (vast amounts of) information, irrespective of its physical location. This paradigm shift in the usage model of the Internet, along with the pressing needs for, among others, better security and mobility support, has led researchers into considering a radical change to the Internet architecture. In this direction, we have witnessed many research efforts investigating Information-Centric Networking (ICN) as a foundation upon which the Future Internet can be built. Our main aims in this survey are: (a) to identify the core functionalities of ICN architectures, (b) to describe the key ICN proposals in a tutorial manner, highlighting the similarities and differences among them with respect to those core functionalities, and (c) to identify the key weaknesses of ICN proposals and to outline the main unresolved research challenges in this area of networking research.