The CONET solution for Information Centric Networking

DISCLAIMER This work has been partly funded by the EU in the context of IST CONVERGENCE (http://www.ict-convergence.eu/) and OFELIA projects (http://www.fp7-ofelia.eu/), but it does not necessarily represent the official position of the project itself and of its partners. Authors are solely responsible for the views, results and conclusions contained in this work. COPYRIGHT "Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors. This work may not be modified or reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder" Information Centric Networking (ICN) has been presented as a revolutionary approach to networking. The proposers of ICN aim to replace the current forwarding mechanism of TCP/IP networks based on host addresses (i.e. IP addresses) with a mechanism based on the " name " of the information to be transported (i.e. the " content name "). The work on ICN has mostly focused on "clean-slate" solutions, in which the IP networking layer is fully replaced by a new information centric networking layer. In this work we propose a different approach towards ICN, based on extending the current IP networking architecture rather than considering its replacement. The proposed framework is called CONET (COntent NETwork). We argue that it is possible to add ICN functionality to IP in a backward compatible way, so that most advantages of ICN can be exploited without dropping IP. Note that considering an evolutionary approach does not preclude the clean-slate one, as the CONET framework and most protocol solutions that we describe can also work in a clean slate environment that does not foresee the IP layer. The CONET framework is very modular and open, it lends itself to support different solutions for specific issues like naming, name based routing, forwarding and transport mechanisms. In addition to this general framework we pursued the definition of a specific ICN solution denoted as coCONET 1. We have started an open source implementation of coCONET, which allows us to build a testbed and to perform measurements. The implementation work (still ongoing) is mostly based from the CCNx In this section we analyze the problem space, i.e. the communication patterns that needs to be supported by the ICN (with no claim of being exhaustive and rigorous), then we discuss the overall approaches for the design of an ICN and decompose the ICN solution space in a set of logical components (see Figure 1).