Information-centric networking:

Concepts for a future Internet

David D. Clark, Karen Sollins

MIT CFPNovember, 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.