SOFIA: toward service-oriented information centric networking

This article presents SOFIA, a service-oriented information-centric networking architecture. SOFIA is designed by exploring the design space between host abstraction and content abstraction. It can facilitate ICN to easily support various applications beyond content retrieval. SOFIA decouples flexible service processing and efficient data transmission into two stack layers: the service and network layers. Service requesting is driven by service name and processed by intermediate routers according to processing rules at the service layer. Applications build on the service layer and manipulate information over service sessions. A service session can further map to multiple service connections for flexibility and high throughput. We also detail three important communication types enabled by SOFIA. Finally, we implement the SOFIA stack based on a Click modular router and develop a few applications.