Information Centric Networks: A New Paradigm for the Internet

Introduction

At the beginning of the Internet, users were academic in nature, mainly interested in mail exchange and file transfers. Furthermore, resource sharing was an important issue that imposed major challenges with regard to communication among end systems [JAC 09a, JAC 12, KUR 12]. Interconnected hosts should exchange data, such as files and database registers, and users had to access remote devices, such as printers and file servers. Thus, the improvement in communication efficiency among hosts was the main goal in this context.

Today, new technologies used by the network core and also by access networks has increased bandwidth availability, at the same time reducing users’ access cost. The bandwidth increase has allowed developing a whole new set of applications, especially multimedia applications. The advent of these applications associated with the cost reduction has brought millions of new users to the Internet. Video-sharing Websites and file-sharing peer-to-peer (P2P) systems [MOR 08] are good examples of these new applications that are quite different from the first Internet applications. Both applications clearly indicate that the content distribution on the Internet has evolved from a textual information system towards a multimedia information system, in which data, services and applications are consumed as contents [PLA 05]. Currently, users are more interested in the content itself regardless of who sends it or its location. Documents, videos, audio, images, ...