On the deployment of information-centric network: Programmability and virtualization

In recent years, information-centric network (ICN) has attracted significant attention from both academia and industry. ICN is characterized by name-based routing, in-network caching and many other advanced network layer techniques. To get the benefit from these new network layer techniques, the network requires severe changes. However, considering the difficulty of deploying a new service on the existing network and the requirement of deploying multiple ICN architectures on the same physical network, the programmability and virtualization of the network is required. The programmability and virtualization techniques can be classified as software-based and hardware-based. The former is represented by software-defined network (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). The latter is headed by NetFPGA. In this paper, we argue, to fully support ICN functionality, we need a unified deployment framework which can provide both software-based and hardware-based programmability and virtualization.