Exploring the Future of Experiencing (in) the Internet: Boosting Adoption of Information-Centric Networking

The Internet’s origin is that of providing basic communication to the many people using it for services like voice, video and basic access to important information. This view of the Internet has found entry in its most central aspect of the architecture, the role of endpoints in a communication. The mental model of two entities conversing for a certain purpose is directly reflected in the communication that underlies IP and its higher layer protocols TCP and HTTP: two endpoints connect and retrieve appropriate information for the purpose of the communication. In the current Internet, there increasingly exist challenges regarding the control over the information transmitted, as well as the efficiency of the overall experience delivery. For instance, the “right to be forgotten”, proposed by the European Commission, aims at solving potential problems about data protection regulation. This proposal underlines the difficulty that Internet users face, since they are not always able to apply policies about their published personal data for cases in which the data is used within different contexts. This aspect of changing contexts of use, however, is crucial when assembling experiences at runtime, i.e., when pulling information as needed for the sake of a larger experience. This aspect of pulling information together for delivering an experience to an end user often reveals efficiency as a major challenge, too. Given that current IP-based networks are agnostic to the information transmitted, there are limits to the support for efficient content-delivery and personalized information-distribution despite attempts of the wider industry to constantly improve on these aspects through, for instance, dedicated content delivery network (CDN) technologies.Several research approaches such as NDN, PURSUIT, have been put forward to address these challenges by improving the current Internet’s underlying architecture for efficient information-dissemination. Solutions in the space of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) suggest that moving from an end-host-based Internet to an information-centric one could bring inherent advantages to efficiency and security in content delivery. Furthermore, such move to a new internetworking architecture is seen as enabling new use cases for future services in order to deliver highly distributed computational tasks, such as needed for the emerging multimedia experiences that we all come to enjoy. However, there are questions and doubts inevitably arising concerning the ICN deployment, which suggests such radical change in current Internet architecture. According to, initial scenarios for partial deployment are necessary for leading to a widespread adoption of new architectures. In this paper, we introduce a business scenario for an efficient, dynamic content-delivery system with improved Quality of Service (QoS) for its end users, called “Story Delivery Network” (SDN). We see this scenario as having the potential for creating an initial force that could drive the deployment of ICN as well as revealing new insight into the overall design of ICN solutions. In order to provide insight into the potential of this scenario, we identify the key stakeholders, the individual ‘tussles’ between them, as well as the potential causal dependencies on other conflicts. Such analysis will provide a useful understanding of the wider socioeconomic environment for such scenario. In particular, we intend to capture potential socioeconomic scenarios, by utilizing system dynamics modeling. Here, the various aspects affecting the efficiency of information dissemination and content delivery, as well as the caching of different content at different levels (i.e., core, access ISP, edge) will provide a wide range of interesting issues relating to user mobility, quality of experience, local policies etc., within the socioeconomic context. With this analysis, the paper aims at increasing our understanding concerning the viability of ICN approaches, extending the socioeconomic evaluation.