Information-centric networks: Categorizations, challenges, and classifications

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) emerges as a promising approach for content dissemination and retrieval with a number of advantages including efficient content delivery, better bandwidth utilization and improved mobility support. In past few years, several ICN architectures have been proposed offering different set of features and characteristics, which makes it difficult to choose a particular architecture, given some network conditions and characteristics at hand. These characteristics include IP compatibility, and choice of naming structures etc. Besides, there is a little focus on a number of challenging areas including congestion control, availability, sporadic behavior, multi-source multi-destination and security etc. Moreover, it is not clear how ICN approaches behave with different emerging network environments such as user-centric networking, object-centric networking, Software-Defined networking and Cloud Computing. In this paper, we target all these issues together. First, we attempt to categorize different ICN architectures based on some common characteristics. Second, we identify a number of research challenges in the ICN domain and provide suggestions on mapping them to different ICN approaches. At the end, we bisect ICN approaches based on their characteristics and classify them on the basis of usability which helps a user choose a particular ICN approach given network requirements at hand.