Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking is an evolution of peer-to-peer (p2p) concepts. To illustrate this, let’s quickly review how the world wide web works.

URLs

You all know URLs, the addresses you may enter into or see in a browser bar. The term URL stands for “Universal Resource Locator” – the key part being the last word. A URL tells the browser where something is located.

There is a related concept of URIs (Universal Resource Identifiers). To make matters more complicated, all URLs are also URIs, but not all URIs are URLs. The difference is that a URI identifies a resource, while a URL locates it – and therefore also works as an identifier of sorts.

If a URI is used that is not also a URL, then there needs to be a system that resolves the URI to a URL before a connection can be established.

IP Addresses

The host name in URLs gets translated into an IP address via the Domain Name System (DNS). IP addresses are what allows computers to connect to each other.

A less known fact is that there are IP address ranges set aside for use as identifiers. That is, while most IP addresses act as locators, not all do.

When using IP addresses that are identifiers, these, too, need to be resolved into different IP addresses that are locators before computers can talk to each other.

Information-Centric Networking

In information-centric networking, the basic idea is that URIs – or similar content identifiers – should be used to connect to computers, not URLs.

This is because we don’t typically care where a resource is, just that we find the right one. That is also why hardly anyone enters URLs into the browser bar any longer – most of us use it to ask a search engine to resolve a search query to a list of candidate URLs.

In Information-centric networking: The evolution from circuits to packets to content, the author argue that ICN presents an evolution from packet switching networks.

Figure: A) Packet Switching

Whereas in packet switching networks, routers switch opaque data packets based on source and destination address, in ICN they take on the role of custodians and caches for data packets.

Figure: B) Information-Centric Networking

Custodians are responsible for permanently storing data (or until deleted). Caches on the other hand keep data packets that traverse them. Nodes can be either custodian or cache, both, or in principle, neither.

Redundancy & Failover

A major benefit of removing locators from finding resources is that it reflects better how we use the internet. If we do not care much about where a resource exists, then it is also possible for the resource to exist in many places at once – so long as it is identical at each location. This provides redundancy & failover in case a single source vanishes.

Performance

Already on the existing web, we use redundancy techniques to also deliver web pages faster. A content-delivery network (CDN) is doing just that. But because the web is not built for this from the ground up, a lot of additions to web technology were developed to ensure that each location has identical content for a resource.

Unfortunately, however, this is still not guaranteed. It is possible, for example, for a CDN to include advertising or tracking into a page.

ICN approaches do not permit such modifications, but leverage the same ability to place resources into many different locations for optimizing performance.

Security & Privacy

The web was not built around identifiers from the ground up. The difference between identifiers and locators was a later addition.

The result is that it remains difficult to ensure a resource is identical in multiple locations, as mentioned above. But the focus on locators also means that the web is primarily concerned with securing the connection between computers.

While ICN does not automatically provide better security, many ICN approaches recognize that when the computer location is less relevant, securing the resource itself becomes more important.

In practice, this means that when you request a specific resource by identifier, there will be cryptographic means available to verify that the received resource is unmodified. Additionally, the resource may be encrypted such that the computers at which it’s currently located may not be able to decipher it.

Interpeer Project

The Interpeer Project approaches ICN from the ground up as a challenge to achieve the highest levels of performance, as well as security & privacy, in order to build a new internet fit for future generations.