Information Centric Networking over SDN and OpenFlow: Architectural Aspects and Experiments on the OFELIA Testbed

摘要

Information Centric Networking (ICN) has been proposed as a new networkingparadigm in which the network provides users with content instead communicationchannels between hosts. The Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach promisesto be a solution to enable the continuous evolution of networkingarchitectures. In this paper we propose and discuss solutions to support ICNusing SDN concepts. We focus on an ICN framework called CONET, which groundsits roots in the CCN/NDN architecture. We face the problem in two complementaryways. First we discuss a general and long term solution based on SDN conceptswithout taking into account specific limitations of SDN standards andequipment. Then we focus on an experiment to support ICN functionality over alarge scale SDN testbed based on OpenFlow, developed in the context of theOFELIA European research project. The current OFELIA testbed is based onOpenFlow 1.0 equipment from a variety of vendors, therefore we had to designthe experiment taking into account the features that are currently available onoff-the-shelf OpenFlow equipment.