Abstract

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has seen a signi?cant resurgence in recent years. ICN promises bene?ts to users and service providers along several dimensions (e.g., performance, security, and mobility). These bene?ts, however, come at a non-trivial cost as many ICN proposals envision adding signi?cant complexity to the network by having routers serve as content caches and support nearest-replica routing. This paper is driven by the simple question of whether this additional complexity is justi?ed and if we can achieve these bene?ts in an incrementally deployable fashion. To this end, we use trace-driven simulations to analyze the quantitative bene?ts attributed to ICN (e.g., lower latency and congestion). Somewhat surprisingly, we ?nd that pervasive caching and nearest-replica routing are not fundamentally necessary—most of the performance bene?ts can be achieved with simpler caching architectures. We also discuss how the qualitative bene?ts of ICN (e.g., security, mobility) can be achieved without any changes to the network. Building on these insights, we present a proof-of-concept design of an incrementally deployable ICN architecture.

 

Manuscript

 

Bibtex