information-centric networking - IEEE Xplore

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GUEST EDITORIAL

INFORMATION-CENTRIC NETWORKING: PART II

Kostas Pentikousis

Prosper Chemouil

W

e argued boldly in the first part of the feature topic on information-centric networking (ICN) [1] that ICN marks a fundamental shift in communications and networking. Indeed, we claim that the paradigm change ICN fosters is poised to have a large impact on the way we think about telecommunications in general, the way we design network architectures in particular, the trade-offs we consider in the specification of (future) protocols, and the possibilities for new services, especially in mobile and wireless environments. For example, in the first part of this feature topic we saw how content-centric networking (CCN) can be used to build social networking applications [2, 3] at a fraction of the complexity of today’s systems. Nonetheless, ICN is still at an early stage of development. Although most researchers in this area would agree on the overall advantages of ICN compared to the current TCP/IP paradigm, as well as the general direction for future work, at least at a conceptual level, there is no consensus on what is the best approach forward for a range of topics. This second part, therefore, aims at bringing to the forefront aspects that were not covered in the first one, such as business incentives and operational concerns, including network management, while extending the coverage on topics such as mobility management and routing. Naming, addressing, and information routing [4], in particular, have been contentious issues in the first years of research in ICN. CCN, which adopts a hierarchical naming scheme, appears to be drawing most of the limelight at this stage. However, alternative network architecture designs, such as those introduced by the European projects PSIRP and PURSUIT [5, 6], aim to achieve the same benefits by embracing a different approach in naming information. This second part also includes articles that voice concerns about certain design choices in prominent ICN proposals and therefore sheds some light on the ongoing debate in the community. As we move forward, however, it is important to make sure that (newly) proposed ICN architectures are expressive enough to enable other architectures, as discussed in [6].

IEEE Communications Magazine • December 2012

Kathleen Nichols

George Pavlou

GROWING INTEREST IN ICN Since the July issue of IEEE Communications Magazine, the ICN community has been very busy presenting new results in a variety of venues. For example, this year’s ACM SIGCOMM conference in August in Helsinki, Finland, hosted a workshop on ICN that was attended by more than 80 participants, while a second Dagstuhl Seminar on ICN attracted leading researchers in September. In September, as well, the second CCNx community meeting took place in Sophia-Antipolis, France, and was attended by 140 participants. Moreover, there is increasing momentum to develop ICN business cases and applications. The Emerging Networks Consortium (ENC) is a recently formed industry forum comprising several leading ICN players including vendors and network carriers that focus on the CCN architecture. ENC aims at encouraging ICN deployment through a business perspective. The importance of keeping the ICN community growing, as well as making more open source code available for everyone’s use, cannot be underestimated at this stage of ICN evolution. Before the term was coined, the original Internet was one of the first open source projects and it was able to take off due to its software being widely available for everyone who wanted to examine, extend, enhance, or simply tinker with it. A key part of the philosophy was that improvements and extensions should be encouraged and adopted as soon as they were deemed useful. As we noted in the first editorial of this series [1], most major ICN efforts have some open source code released to the community. CCNx in particular aims to develop, promote, and evaluate content-centric networking following an open source approach, and targets the creation of a larger community of researchers that work on ICN. This effort has proven quite successful so far. The importance of this is perhaps reflected by a large majority of papers involving implementation based on CCNx, made prototype software available as open source quite early, gearing up to support and encourage that community. Just as in the

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GUEST EDITORIAL design and adoption of the Internet, there is a large role for open source to play in the business of redesigning networking. As other major ICN projects (e.g., NetInf and PURSUIT) release and promote their own open source projects, the research prototype landscape may change. ICN is evolving in another sense too. The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), which focuses on long-term research work related to Internet protocols, established the Information-Centric Networking Research Group (ICNRG) this year. ICNRG held its inaugural meeting during IETF 84 on 1 August 2012 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Approximately 120 IETF delegates attended the meeting. We expect that ICNRG can play a pivotal role in advancing ICN beyond research projects toward wider experimental activities and, in the mid-term, interoperable experimental deployments.

ICN, PART 2 The first part of this feature topic that appeared in the July issue [1] had the ambition to introduce the basic concepts of several new ICN architectures, such as NetInf [4], content-centric networking (CCN) [2, 3], and the publish-subscribe Internet (PSI) architecture [5, 6]. The articles that appeared in that issue put their emphasis on the fundamentally required functionality and addressed potential use cases to illustrate the differences in network design with the TCP/IP paradigm. When the Call for Papers for the ICN feature topic in IEEE Communications Magazine closed, it became apparent that we had far more top-quality papers than could fit in one issue. Thus, we proposed a second part of the feature topic on ICN, addressing other important issues, including economic models, mobility management, network management, as well as revisiting the location and naming debate that has been ongoing in the ICN community for some time now, as summarized in [7]. With the generous concurrence of Steve Gorshe, IEEE Communications Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, we present additional material on ICN. We hope that this second feature topic will enlarge your scope of understanding ICN as well as the opinions of different researchers on ICN in addressing additional issues that may become of real importance should this architecture be adopted. We start this second part on ICN with a topic that was not covered in the July issue: economic incentives for deploying ICN. Agyapong and Sirbu, in their article “Economic Incentives in Information-Centric Networking: Implications for Protocol Design and Public Policy,” make the case for the importance of evaluating the economic incentives for all relevant stakeholders to deploy ICN. More specifically, they provide a contribution to this field by considering the economic incentives in deploying a storage infrastructure within the network. Although the analyzed model is focused on the deployment of a CDN-type storage model (i.e., adding large repositories to networks) rather than exploiting existing router memory (e.g., as in NDN), this article provides an opening reference for the important ICN topic of economic incentives. ICN mobility management was covered in part in the July issue, but we believe that this topic deserves more attention. Lee et al. propose an approach to manage con-

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tent source mobility within CCN in their article entitled “Device Mobility Management in Content-Centric Networking.” The authors identify a potential issue with the NDN/CCN architecture with respect to routing table pollution and long communication setup latency which is exacerbated by the existence of mobile content sources. The authors propose a tunnel-based redirection solution and evaluate their approach through simulation. The article entitled “A Named Data Networking Flexible Framework for Management Communications” by Corujo et al. addresses the management of ICN networks, which is an important and thus far under-addressed area. Corujo et al. focus on the specific NDN architecture, but believe their framework can have utility for other ICN architectures. The authors propose a framework based on management entities and management agents, describe their (secure) interaction, and evaluate the feasibility of their approach by applying it to NDN/CCN face management in a prototype network experiment using CCNx. As mentioned above, a lot of work in the first phase of ICN research has been directed toward naming and addressing. The July issue covered this topic to a large degree. Although there are several survey papers on ICN, each includes the particular perspective of the surveyors. The explicit detailing of that perspective adds to the public dialog on the desirable features of ICN architecture. In this issue, the article by Bari et al. entitled “A Survey of Naming and Routing in Information Centric Networks” looks into naming and routing in ICNs, and presents a perspective on the authors’ comparison and their “ideal” model. It is important to note that not everyone believes an ICN revolution is needed [8]. Sarolahti et al. take a very different approach to ICN in their article “Locations vs. Identities in Internet Content: Applying Information-Centric Principles in Today’s Networks.” The authors attempt to add ICN functionality to the current Internet with as little disruption as possible, specifically introducing secure location-independent content identification to HTTP. This notion of HTTP as a platform to provide ICN services was first suggested by a different group [9], but the authors believe their approach is closer to reaping the benefits of ICN architectures with little disruption to the current Internet. This article represents the point of view that the Internet can evolve as it has in the past. The sixth article, which wraps up Part 2 of the feature topic on ICN, deals with the under-addressed topic of ICN routing. In their article entitled “CATT: Cache Aware Target Identification for ICN,” Eum et al. propose an ICN architecture that is based on the location, retrieval, and caching of stored content. To make ICN feasible, a new approach to routing will be necessary in order to avoid an explosion in the amount of traffic created to report on the location of information. The authors propose potentialbased routing (PBR) as a way to reduce the amount of traffic needed to locate information objects. PBR adopts a field-based approach to ICN content location and integrates it with topology-aware on-path content caching. Simulation is used to evaluate alternate approaches for PBR and caching.



GUEST EDITORIAL CONCLUDING REMARKS

BIOGRAPHIES

As we conclude this introduction to the second part of the feature topic, it is fair to say that there is no clear consensus on which ICN architecture, if any one in particular, will serve best as the foundation for future work in this area. Nevertheless, there are ICN aspects on which most proposed approaches presented in this two-part feature topic agree. ICN is a very active area of research, and we could argue that it is reasonable that the major players will disagree on which is the best proposal and even on how to interpret one another’s approaches. Thus, the articles we have selected in this two-part series will not leave the reader with one clear view of this next revolution in networking; readers will need to read the evidence, follow the topic, and, ultimately, see how it all turns out, perhaps lending a hand in the solution.

KOSTAS PENTIKOUSIS ([email protected]) is a senior research engineer with Huawei Technologies in Berlin, Germany. From 2005 to 2009 he was a senior research scientist with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in informatics (1996) from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and his Master’s (2000) and doctoral degrees (2004) in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His research interests include network architecture and protocol design, energy-efficient networking, and information-centric networking.

REFERENCES [1] K. Pentikousis et al., “Information-Centric Networking,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 50, no. 7, July 2012. [2] V. Jacobson et al., “Custodian-Based Information Sharing,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 50, no. 7, July 2012. [3] Mathieu et al., “Information-Centric Networking: A Natural Design for Social Network Applications,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 50, no. 7, July 2012. [4] B. Ahlgren et al., “A Survey of Information-Centric Networking,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 50, no. 7, July 2012. [5] G. Xylomenos et al., “Caching and Mobility Support in a Publish-Subscribe Internet Architecture,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 50, no. 7, July 2012. [6] D. Trossen and G. Parisis, “Designing and Realizing an Information-Centric Internet,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 50, no. 7, July 2012. [7] K. Pentikousis, Proc. 8th Int’l. Conf. Networks, Gosier, France, Mar. 2009. [8] A. Ghodsi et al., “Information-Centric Networking: Seeing the Forest for the Trees,” Proc. HotNets-X, Cambridge, MA, USA, ACM, Nov. 2011. [9] L. Popa et al., “HTTP as the Narrow Waist of the Future Internet,” Proc. HotNets-IX, Monterey, CA, Oct. 2010.


PROSPER CHEMOUIL [F] ([email protected]) is currently research director on networks and systems at Orange Labs, the R&D Centre of Orange/France Telecom. He graduated from École Centrale de Nantes, France, in 1975 and obtained a Ph.D. in control in 1978. He then joined the Centre National d’Etudes des Telecommunications (CNET) in 1980 where he led the Network Engineering and Management Department. His current interests are with the design and management of future networks and their impact on network architecture, traffic engineering, and QoS. He is specifically concerned with information-centric networking, programmable networking, and autonomic networking. KATHLEEN NICHOLS ([email protected]) is the founder and CTO of Pollere Inc., a consulting company working in both government and commercial networking. She has 30 years of experience in networking, including a number of Silicon Valley companies and as a cofounder of Packet Design. GEORGE PAVLOU [SM] ([email protected]) is a full professor of communication networks in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College London, United Kingdom, where he coordinates research activities in networking and network management. He received a Diploma in Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from University College London. His research interests focus on networking and network management, including aspects such as traffic engineering and quality of service management, policy-based systems, autonomic networking, content-centric networking, and software-defined networks. He is currently the technical leader of the COMET project.

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