Download PDFBridging the ICN Deployment Gap with IPoC: An IP-over-ICN protocol for 5G Networks
by Susmit Shannigrahi, Chengyu Fan, and Greg White
Information-centric networking (ICN) is a new networking paradigm that addresses content directly rather than addressing end-hosts. An ICN-based networking layer aligns better with application needs by providing content-centric security, in-network caching, and intelligent packet forwarding making it useful to both users and service providers alike. However, transitioning to an ICN-only networking paradigm will require all IP applications to be rewritten to use ICN natively, a tall order in a world with millions of applications connected to the Internet. In this paper, we propose IPoC, a general purpose tunneling protocol that enables all IP applications to utilize ICN networks. We implement the IPoC protocol using Named Data Networking (NDN) semantics and using mobile communication as the driving example, compare our protocol performance with native IP. We show that the protocol overhead and performance degradation of IPoC is minimal which makes it suitable for immediate deployment. In return, we show how NDN and IPoC can bring ICN benefits to 5G mobile networks by simplifying the mobility plane, introducing intelligent functionality, and reducing network complexity.