Providing Information Centricity in Today’s Internet via Software-Defined Networking and In-Network Processing

The Internet is a successful network that connects people all over the world. However, it has some fundamental architectural problems which require application developers and service providers to spend a tremendous effort in combating these. Examples for these efforts are content delivery networks or mobile TCP. Thus, it can be said that the Internet is currently not fulfilling the requirements on the global network anymore. The Internet of the future, or its replacement, must solve these problems.

There are multiple clean-slate approaches for information-centric networking. However, they are inherently incompatible to the Internet or applications building on it.

This work presents a novel resource transport protocol that is optimized for detection by software-defined networks and may be re-routed to in-network processors. Furthermore, it is shown how this protocol can be used to support concepts of ICN even in today’s Internet. Moreover, the resource format that is used in this work is independent from the underlying network, resulting in possible reuse in other networks as well. Applications and protocols building on this resource format can thus easily be re-used in clean-slate networks like NDN.