VICN: a versatile deployment framework for information-centric networks

Information-centric networking, ICN, is a promising technology for future Internet design, with which a user can directly obtain a content object by its name (or identification), without specifying the location of the content object. In recent years, various ICN architectures have been proposed, and they differ significantly in terms of naming, routing, etc. Consequently, it becomes a major challenge to convince network service providers to deploy ICN-enabled networks. In this article, we will address this challenging issue by proposing a novel deployment framework, versatile ICN, based on software-defined networking concepts, which can efficiently enable different ICN architectures and can facilitate interoperation among ICN instances. Specifically, we first review existing ICN architectures and abstract their core functions. We then elaborate on the main ideas of the VICN framework, including application scenarios, design criteria, and key hardware and software components. To illustrate how the framework can be applied, we develop a prototype that can enable two major ICN architectures, and also facilitate interoperation between them. Using the prototype, we conduct evaluations to show how a user of one ICN instance can obtain a content object from another ICN instance, where the two ICN instances adopt different ICN architectures and are deployed on two NSP networks. Evaluation results confirm that the proposed framework is viable and can lead to much better delay and throughput performance.