Decoupling information and connectivity via information-centric transport
Hila Ben Abraham, Jyoti Parwatikar, John DeHart, Adam Drescher, Patrick Crowley · 2018
The power of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures lies in their abstraction for communication - the request for named data. This abstraction promises that applications can choose to operate only in the information plane, agnostic to the mechanisms implemented in the connectivity plane. However, despite this powerful promise, the information and connectivity planes are presently coupled in today's incarnations of leading ICNs by a core architectural component, the forwarding strategy. Presently, this component is not sustainable: it implements both the information and connectivity mechanisms without specifying who should choose a forwarding strategy - an application developer or the network operator. In practice, application developers can specify a strategy only if they understand connectivity details, while network operators can assign strategies only if they understand application expectations.