Bringing ICN To Software-Defined Infrastructures

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a class of Future Internet protocols that can empower and protect networks by using names rather than addresses to identify data and move packets. This capability allows ICN architectures to build networks that are secure by design and that can better handle the addressing, mobility, and multicasting challenges of managing network flows in dynamic computing environments in contrast to IP. For these reasons, ICN can benefit communications in Software-Defined Infrastructures (i.e., SDIs) by increasing the potential and flexibility to meet emerging and dynamic applications requirements. SDIs provide a unified view towards the management of hardware, storage, and networking resources in a distributed computing environment that are becoming typical of the infrastructures that serve applications at Internet scale. SDIs intrinsically are able to handle the networking challenges to extend to more application areas, to lower operational costs, and to enable enhanced user experience. In this paper, we introduce a proposal to create an ICN-enabled SDI environment using the SAVI testbed. We evaluate the benefits of ICN in our SDI environment by measuring key performance indicators in a use case scenario. Our analyses show promise for ICN to improve latency and the handling of multicasting in SDI networks.