On the deployment of information-centric network: Programmability and virtualization

Information centric networking (ICN) and software-defined networking (SDN) are two emerging networking paradigms that promise to solve different aspects of networking problems. ICN is a clean-slate design for accommodating the ever increasing growth of the Internet traffic by regarding content as the network primitive, adopting in-network caching, and name-based routing, while SDN focuses on agile and flexible network management by decoupling network control logic from data forwarding. ICN and SDN have gained significant research attention separately in the most of the previous work. However, the features of ICN have profound impacts on the design and operation of SDN, such as in-network caching and data-centric security. Conversely, SDN provides a powerful tool for experimenting and deploying ICN architectures and can greatly facilitate ICN functionality and management. In this paper, we point out the necessity of surveying the scattered works on integrating SDN and ICN (SD-ICN) for improving operational networks. Specifically, we analyze the points of SD-ICN strengths and opportunities, and discuss the SDN enablers for deploying ICN architectures. In addition, we review and classify the recent work on improving the network management by SD-ICN and discuss the potential security benefits of SD-ICN. Finally, a number of open issues and future trends are highlighted.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are both new evolving network architectures that are receiving a lot of attention from researchers. ICN is a Future Internet architecture which tries to transform the current Internet architecture from location- and host-centric to content-centric, where obtaining requested data is achieved by the contents’ names regardless of the location of the data. From another angle, SDN is considered a new Internet architecture that moves the control plane management from network devices to a centralized controller. The SDN controller enhances network robustness and improves its scalability, reliability, and flexibility. The integration of ICN and SDN results in massive benefits, where SDN enhances ICN networks’ manageability, controllability, and functionality, and ICN reshapes the SDN design to make it compatible with ICN features and to enhance ICN in terms of network caching, routing, mobility, and security.. In this review paper, a comprehensive survey of the issues and challenges of integrating ICN and SDN is presented. Firstly, ICN’s main characteristics are summarized, and a short comparison between different ICN architectures is completed. Then, the key details of SDN are highlighted. Moreover, the motivation and benefits of merging ICN with SDN are summarized and the state-of-the-art work on merging ICN and SDN is reviewed and classified from several aspects. Finally, several open research issues are highlighted.

The discovery process of OPC Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) is well defined but lacks flexibility when implemented in large networks. While the standard provides concepts for local and global discovery services, the core assumption is that all clients and servers are aware of the discovery server(s) in the network. This dependency is a barrier for Plug-and-Play installations and is overcome by self announces via the multicast Domain Name System (mDNS), however, this scales badly with an increasing number of network nodes and deployed servers. We propose a discovery approach based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), that installs a plug-and-play mechanism for global OPC-UA discovery in modern virtualized networks.

Information-Centric Networks (ICN) see the future architecture of the internet (radical change) by using an information-driven model and integrating from the design the essential functionalities to reach the best performances. Current approaches to ICN employ in-network caching to minimize the latency of information retrieval. Any content distribution over the network will be decided by the caching strategy adopted either along the delivery path or off-path caching. In ICN, caching is a key component essential for improving the quality of service by bringing content as close as possible to customers and reducing network traffic thereby minimizing bottlenecks and waiting time for customers. Software-Defined Networks is characterized by a total separation between the forwarding and control planes, easy network programmability, support for existing applications and architectures, and even for the deployment of new architectures with an open exchange. ICN and SDN are both very active axes proposing solutions for the future architecture of the Internet but with two different starting points. Their integration certainly triggers a promising hybrid solution but generates challenges such as in-network caching and data-centric security functionalities from an SDN perspective. In return, ICN is a radical solution that requires an organizer/supervisor to be deployed on the architectures of existing networks. Because of this, in this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the existing in-network caching mechanisms for CCN and SD-CCN architectures.

Information-centric networking (ICN) can bring many benefits to network operators, e.g., in-network request resolution via router's cache, and name-based forwarding. However, creating a smooth migration path from the current IP network to the ICN is a challenging task that must be investigated. Network function virtualization (NFV) is one of the key technologies to achieve this migration because of its flexibility in supporting new network services as software. Nevertheless, when we consider the deployment of ICN services over NFV, two performance issues are found: processing delay of name look-up and computational overhead of the virtual machine. In this paper we propose NFV infrastructure-assisted name-based forwarding by integrating the name look-up into the Open vSwitch. The contributions are twofold: 1) First, we provide a novel look-up scheme that can forward ICN packets without costly longest prefix match searching. 2) Second, we integrate this forwarding scheme into the virtualization infrastructure to mitigate computational overhead.

Recently, a new trend has emerged based on combining software defined networking (SDN) and information centric networking (ICN) as a promising approach for the future internet. More serious control plane problems related to scalability, fault-tolerance and consistency may affect software defined information centric networking (SD-ICN) compared to traditional SDN environment regarding new augmented features such as content name-based communication and in-network caching. In this paper, we propose a distributed software defined information centric networking (DSD-ICN) that provides ICN features over SDN network with multiple controllers. We addressed in our design the fault-tolerant and strong consistency of the control plane which allows the transparent distribution of the content over different network domains.

Information centric networking (ICN) is proposed as a solution for dealing with the problems facing the Internet. It changes its data transmission mode from host-to-host into content-centric one. However, the existing Internet is not convenient to deploy ICN. With the appearing of software defined networking (SDN), researchers see a glimmer of hope to deploy ICN easily. Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF) is a new solution for SDN. It will attract eyeball because it is more flexible than existing solutions. This paper presents an approach which combines ICN and POF because of their salient features. This approach gives a solution to deploy ICN. Existing approaches give solutions to deploy ICN over OpenFlow which is another solution for SDN. But these approaches have some limits because they continue to use IP based format. The approaches in this paper solve these problems by designing a new packet format. POF could identify the new packet because it is protocol oblivious.

Information-Centric Networks (ICN) is a communication paradigm that promises to transfer the Internet from a host-to-host communication network to a massive information delivery system, capable of supporting the future needs of the users. ICNs are based on three main concepts: content forwarding, in-network caching, and multicasting. To realize these three key concepts, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as an important potential candidate, due to its ability to implement all network intelligence in a reprogrammable device known as the controller. However, the integration of these two networking paradigms presents many challenges. This paper studies these challenges and highlights key areas where more effort is needed from the research community. Particularly, the paper focuses on the architectural modifications necessary to incorporate SDN in ICN architectures, including the necessary modifications to the popular OpenFlow protocol. In addition, the paper studies several implementation challenges arising from the integration of SDN and ICN such as the need for a scalable and distributed SDN control that is highly responsive in meeting dynamic user requests, and the need for a semantic naming scheme for content that provides the users with a large degree of expressiveness in specifying their requests. The paper surveys key research efforts that address these challenges and highlights some promising solutions and open research problems therein.

Current Internet architecture is becoming inadequate for new requirements of highly scalable and efficient distribution of contents. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is one of the alternatives for the Next Generation Internet (NGI), which focuses mainly on contents. In-network caching is one of the major attributes of ICN, which allows contents to be cached in any ICN node. Any user can access ICN contents from different distributed locations. This attribute maximizes the problem of unauthorized access to ICN contents. In this paper, we propose a Decentralized Access Control Protocol for ICN architectures (DACPI). In this protocol, fewer public messages are needed for access control enforcement between ICN subscribers and ICN nodes than the existing access control protocols. DACPI depends on ICN self-certifying naming scheme. We perform security analysis on DACPI for the following attacks: man-in-the-middle, forward security, replay attacks, integrity, and privacy violations. According to the security analysis, DACPI prevents unauthorized access to ICN contents with fewer messages passed.

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2018 ACM International Workshop on Security in Software Defined Networks & Network Function Virtualization - SDN-NFV Security'18. SDN-NFV Security'18 offers a unique opportunity by bringing together researchers from academic, industry, as well as government agencies to discuss security challenges faced by two emerging networking paradigms, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). SDN-NFV Security'18 solicits the submission of original unpublished ideas in 6-page long papers and 4-page short papers that address the latest practices, experiences, and lessons learned on SDN and NFV security. The call for papers attracted submissions from Europe and the United States. SDN-NFV Security'18 accepted 3 full papers be presented in this workshop, after a rigorous review process (at least 4 reviews for each paper) and discussion phase. In addition, we have invited 8 papers (5 full papers and 3 short papers) from domain experts to be presented in the workshop.

In this era wireless technology gaining more popularity, people prefer wireless communication over wired communication due to mobility, scalability and ease of access. However, the traditional wireless network is complex, vendor dependent and inadequate feasibility to incorporate new services, protocols, and APIs. The rapid growth in wireless network raises many thoughtful challenges for network and telecom operators. On such grounds, Innovation of Software Defined Network (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) for mobile network opens a new arena of research. This research article presents future mobile Internet architecture (FMIA) with the integration of twin technologies, SDN and NFV that enable rapid access to Internet services. Moreover, the network manager can control services provided by ISPs through proposed architecture.

Information Centric Networks (ICN) has emerged as a new Internet paradigm where the users are being provided seamless access to contents rather than the host as in classical approach. For ICN realization, the current Internet requires architectural changes. These changes must be incorporated such that existing applications continue running without any difficulties. In this paper, we introduce a novel ICN architecture, called Overlay Information Centric Networks (O-ICN), which separates the data plane from the control plane activities of the network. Unlike the usual ICN architectures, in our approach naming and routing (control plane) functionalities have been segregated from the caching (data plane) functionality at each ICN router. We introduce a new module called an ICN Manager which is an extended version of Domain Name System (DNS) server and performs name resolution along with routing functionalities for ICN type of requests as well as the normal DNS resolution for non-ICN type of requests. The O-ICN architecture can be deployed incrementally over the current Internet and can operate both as ICN and non-ICN/legacy network simultaneously. This can also be implemented both in Software Defined Networks (SDN) as well as non-SDN networks without much modifications. The proposed architecture provides benefits in terms of simplification of network management, vendor independent solution, better use of network resources in terms of bandwidth and delay, and reduction of deployment/operational cost of the network.

With the rapid growth of internet traffic, the traditional host-to-host TCP/IP architecture is subject to many service limitations faced with content-oriented applications. Various novel network architectures have been proposed to solve these limitations, among which Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is one of the most prominent. ICN features the decoupling of content (service) from the physical devices storing (providing) it through location-independent naming, and offers inherent enhancement to network performance, such as multicast and in-network caching. ICN in-network caching has been extensively studied, and we believe that it may also be the main incentive for ISPs to deploy ICN. A CDN (content delivery network) is a typical content-oriented network paradigm that aims to provide the fast delivery of content. In this paper, we leverage the advantages of the in-network caching of ICN to enhance the content delivery efficiency of CDN by integrating ICN as a service. First, we present our design of a content delivery network enhanced with ICN, called IECDN. Additionally, we formulate a mathematical model to optimize the performance of our proposed design and conduct a series of evaluations. The results indicate that our proposed design provides significant performance gains while reducing bandwidth consumption and shows better resilience to traffic surge.

International audience

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new and promising network concept which is founded upon the idea that most users in the internet are interested in accessing digital objects, irrespectively of their locations. Digital objects in ICN have unique names that are used in order to route data content from the source node to the destination node. During the content delivery from sources to destinations, the data contents are cached to intermediate nodes in order to achieve efficient and reliable distribution of the data content among the network infrastructure (in-network caching). In this research project we focus on the efficiency of ICN for delivering Big Data with Persistent Identifiers. We proposed a Mapping Architecture for resolving PIDs to ICN names and we evaluate the efficiency of in-network caching when delivering Big Data objects. Our results showed that in-network caching can offer significant performance benefits when the cache size of the network elements that perform in-network caching is bigger than the Big Data object size.