Context-aware distributed service provisioning based on anycast for information-centric network

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a new emerging concept, in which the principal paradigm shifts from the traditional end-to-end connection to the information-centric communication model. In ICN, information unit, such as content or service, is distributed in different sites or data centers to provide large-scale services. A common supporting approach for scalable service provisioning is deploying multiple replica servers throughout the network. Accordingly, an efficient and flexible scheme is needed to direct distributed requests to an appropriate replica server. In this paper, we first propose an incrementally deployable ICN architecture based on edge/core separation. And then, a practical anycast-based service provisioning scheme is presented with joint considerations of both servers contexts and the underlying network conditions. Extensive experiments have been performed to evaluate the proposed scheme. Experiment results show that efficient context-aware distributed service provisioning can be achieved.