Research On A Unified Framework Of Information-centric Networking

The current network is based on the TCP-IP protocol, which is a host-oriented end-to-end communication model. In this model, the key of data transmission is IP address. Any network connection is built upon the knowledge of destination entity address. But in recent years, the network ecological environment has been greatly changed, and most of the network traffic is occupied by file transmission. For current Internet consumers, what they concern is the content itself and the accessing speed, not where the content is obtained from anymore. Based on this point, end-to-end communication model cannot match the new environment perfectly. As a result, the concept of Information-Centric Networking(ICN) and Software-Defined Networking(SDN) were proposed.In ICN networks, content name is the key point. When consumer send the content requests, they no longer need to know the IP address of the content owner, but to request using content name directly. SDN separates the control plane from forwarding plane, so that network engineers can customize the functions of forwarding plane through the method of software programming, which facilitates the deployment of the new network architectures and protocols.Currently, some research has already achieved the deployment of ICN by utilizing SDN technology. However, those deployments mainly focus on the implementation details of a specific ICN network. What is more, the deployment environment above could not support other ICN network at the same time, and could not provide the coexistence environment for different ICN architectures as well.Based on the study of SDN principle and mainstream ICN architectures, this thesis proposes a unified information-centric network architecture called SD-ICN. The architecture makes it possible for network service providers and content providers to deploy a new ICN network with efficiency and pertinence. Moreover, SD-ICN architecture provides the features of coexistence and interoperability for various ICN networks.In this thesis, switch-connected multi-machine experiment and simulation experiment were designed and carried out, which compared the interoperable network with the single architecture network. According to the experiment results, the performance of the interoperable network based on SD-ICN architecture is improved in two aspects. First of all, the increase of content providers shortens the average network response time and reduces the link request redundancy, which saves bandwidth resource. On the other aspect, server workloads are decreased due to the fully use of internal network caches. In all, SD-ICN architecture not only facilitates the network deployment, but also benefits the content providers, network service providers and the network consumer.