1. Information-centric networking: Concepts for a future Internet David D. Clark, Karen Sollins MIT CFP November, 2012

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.)

6. Very different approaches Explicit vs. implicit positioning of content. Security model. Privacy model. Relation to CDNs and higher-level services.

7. 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.

8. 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.