Network of Information defines an Information-Centric Network (ICN) with named “information objects”, for instance, the latest episode of your favourite TV-show, as the central concept as opposed to a physical computer, or “node”. The outcome will be a set of mechanisms to determine the location of a suitable copy of the requested information, and to select the right means to deliver that information to the requester.
The development of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) concepts is one of the significant results of different international Future Internet research activities. In such approaches, the principal paradigm is not host-to-host communication as in the current Internet architecture. Instead, an increasing demand for highly scalable and efficient distribution of content has motivated the development of architectures that focus on information objects, their properties, and receiver interest in the network to achieve efficient and reliable distribution of such objects. Corresponding network architectures can leverage in-network storage, multiparty communication through replication and interaction models such as publish-subscribe to provide general platforms for communication services that are today only available in dedicated systems such as peer-to-peer overlays and proprietary content-distribution networks.
Important research topics for ICN include:
- naming and addressing
how to name information objects, how to represent location information, - routing and resolution
deciding on how to forward “interest” in information and actual information objects, whether and how to resolve information object names to lower layer identifiers during that process, - resource management
implications of in-network caching and paradigms such as receiver-orientation to resource sharing, congestion control etc. and - security privacy
data protection and key distribution have to be adapted to the new communication models.
