Information-centric
networking:
Concepts for a future
Internet
David D. Clark, Karen Sollins
MIT CFP
November, 2012
Background
• Both the NSF and the EC have funded a number
of projects to look at architectures for a future
Internet.
– What might the Internet of 15 years from now look
like?
• Various of the proposals are motivated by
different visions of the future:
– Mobility, cloud, etc.
– Information-centric networks (ICN) is one such
theme.
The general idea
• Today, the Internet hooks computers
together.
– But computers are just a low-level platform for
higher level services and objects.
– Why not design the network to connect to
services and objects, rather than machines?
– Better align mechanism with application-level
goals.
Mechanically…
• In ICN designs, the network knows about
these higher-level objects.
– There are names for these objects that are
visible at the network layer.
– These names can drive packet forwarding and
other network-level services.
The benefit?
• In general, the objective is more efficient delivery of
content, in particular high-volume popular content.
– Today, the network layer computes routes among
machines.
– CDNs pick the source cache from which to deliver
content.
– These two mechanisms are not well coupled.
– Can ICNs solve this problem?
– When lots of people want the same content, can the
network help with efficient delivery?
• (Specific proposals have other objectives.)
Very different approaches
•
•
•
•
Explicit vs. implicit positioning of content.
Security model.
Privacy model.
Relation to CDNs and higher-level services.
Named data networking
• NDN:
– Data is broken into packets, each of which have a
name.
– To fetch data, send an interest packet, with the
name of the desired data packet.
– Every router in the network can cache data
packets.
– A strategy layer tries to forward the interest in a
useful direction toward the data.
Publish/subscribe for Internet
• PSIRP:
– Producer of content picks a set of machines to
host the content. (A scope.)
– Scopes are recursively named, and have explicit
addresses.
– A subscribe (similar function to an interest) is
explicitly forwarded to the scope, which picks a
source machine for the transfer.