Quality of service in an information-centric network

QoS provisioning is one of the key challenges facing current as well as future Internet architectures. Its dependency on content recognition does not allow a straightforward support of QoS in the IP, host-centric, model. In contrast, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) offers native content identification in the network, which can be exploited to develop a common, elegant, framework for supporting QoS-based delivery. Therefore, ICN may naturally overcome many of the cumbersome fixes and limitations of today´s solutions. In this work, we exploit the flexibility in semantic representation offered by ICN to present a flexible and scalable ICN-based QoS model. Our model defines QoS requirements as information items that can be linked to the content at various aggregation levels, independent of the communication approach. Therefore, it can be applied uniformly to various network types and hierarchies. Furthermore, our model offers enhanced traffic treatment as well as resource utilization while significantly reducing the overhead on the network.