A Novel IP-ICN Coexistence Deployable Frame-work Based SDN
Yi Liu, Chengyan Li, Tong Li, Jie Song · 2021
Information-Centric Network (ICN) emerged as a new Internet paradigm to address the problems arising from the mismatch between the TCP/IP host-to-host transmission pattern and content-oriented access mode. However, the current network infrastructure does not support ICN. ICN needs to be deployed incrementally on existing networks, and its coexistence with IP is inevitable. Software-Defined Network (SDN) is an effective solution for achieving flexible and controlled deployment. In this paper, we design a compatible format for IP packets and NDN (Named Data Networking, Typical representatives of ICN) packets based on MPLS. On this basis, a network architecture for IP and NDN coexistence, called SDNDN (Software-Defined Named Data Network), is designed in combination with SDN. With data plane programmable capabilities, functionally extended switches enable parsing, processing, and forwarding of NDN packets; algorithms such as route optimization and cache management are implemented based on a global view. Experimental results indicate that SDNDN can realize the coexistence of ICN and IP networks and has performance advantages such as reduced content retrieval time. Besides, IP and NDN in the coexistence network are suited to different traffic models, which facilitates flexible network slicing.