Information Centric Networks: A New Paradigm for the Internet

4

Challenges

The research on ICN, although quite recent, has already experienced some progress with a large number of propositions and solutions covering a wide range of problems and challenges for different issues. However, there are still many open problems and practical aspects for deployment that call for a more detailed investigation. This chapter discusses the main challenges related to naming, routing, caching, security, economic models, practical aspects for deployment and real-time applications. For each subject, we present the main contributions in the literature and try to point out some possible future directions.

4.1. Naming

Content names are the basic network primitive of all architectures proposed to ICNs, as discussed in Chapter 3. In fact, the naming mechanism adopted by each architecture provides different levels of persistence, scalability and user-friendliness. Ideally, an ICN architecture should provide globally unique, secure, location-independent and human-friendly names [BAR 12]. Thus, the main challenge in this area is to develop a naming mechanism that fulfills all these requirements. In practice, the current naming approaches – flat, hierarchical, and attribute-value based – partially satisfy a few of them [CHO 11].

Flat naming approaches provide uniqueness but suffer from lack of hierarchy and, thus, flat names are difficult to aggregate. Consequently, network scalability may be compromised because of the size of the routing tables. Ghodsi et al. [GHO ...