Arguments for an information-centric internetworking architecture

Abstract

The current Internet architecture focuses on communicating entities, largely leaving aside the information to be ex-changed 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 ma-chines 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.

Pervasive persistent identification for information centric networking

“…We have gone from the scalability of the DNS to the Web to the ICN projects such as PURSUIT and CCN. PURSUIT ([20], [27]), with an identifier per object for each scope within which it is published and CCN, which identifies each packet or element of delivery (fragment of an object) distinctly, make significantly larger scaling demands than the Web.…”

“…The PURSUIT concept of scopes (see [27]) as a mechanism to achieve scalability was derived from Sollins on the concept of regions ( [25]), although it was preceded by the nested Internet routing structure of Autonomous Systems. Both the flat and strictly hierarchical approaches of the systems discussed above assume an Internet like approach to resolution, based on longest prefix matching, which in turn suggests that prefixes can be consolidated efficiently.…”

Scalability of information centric networking using mediated topology management

“…Both of these technologies effectively break the node centric model, although users are essentially unaware that a single domain name does not mean a single physical server with one address. Recently researchers have questioned whether creating elaborate technologies to bolster up a node centric model is sensible and have turned instead to alternate architectures which label information items in a manner that focusses less on where they are stored and more on what they are, and how they relate to other information items (Trossen et al, 2010). There is not yet a single architecture which can be said to definitively provide this alternative paradigm and there are a number of alternative architectures said to fall under terms such as information centric networking (ICN) (Trossen and Parisis, 2012), content centric networking (CCN) or named data networking (NDN) (Jacobson et al, 2009).…”

Distributed Placement of Autonomic Internet Services

“…Numerous ISP-owned home gateways can be instrumented through virtualization technologies to host those lightweight peer servers and create a distributed Internet service platform that leverages enduser proximity. This shift towards more distributed data storage paradigms is further evidenced in a) the emerging Information-centric networking (ICN) paradigm [9] and its "in-network storage" argument; b) the realization of distributed-fashion social networks. In ICN, the network is equipped with functionality that allows it to contribute actively and reliably to the distribution of information objects.…”