Since our PSIRP efforts, much work has gone into design and realisation of our vision that is the information-centric networking (ICN) Internet. PURSUIT continued this work since September 2010.
The IEEE Communications Magazine has now run a number of special issue articles on the ICN topic. The efforts in PURSUIT are represented by two articles (among 5 total articles – that’s a great achievement!), one on caching and mobility (discussed here) and one on the overall design and implementation. In the latter article by George Parisis and myself, you can find the main design tenets, the fundamental layering in our design approach as well as the realisation of all of this within our line-speed prototype Blackadder. This article, needless to say, is the result of the many discussions and the hard work of the wider PURSUIT team.
For those of you who have followed our deliverables, much of the text will be well-known. It serves, however, as an anchor point for references to our design and implementation work that can be used by ourselves and others who find the PURSUIT work relevant. It also provides some new insights into the performance of our prototype, and we also illustrate the layering tenet through a segmentation example that utilises algorithmic identification as a neat approach to relate seemingly unrelated information items through algorithmic relations that are embedded into the item identifiers.
A section that we added based on the feedback from the editors showcases how we see other ICN architectures (including today’s IP) being enabled by the design tenets that we bring forward in this article. While we haven’t gone through all of the necessary details for this enablement, we do assert that there is a common set of tenets that can enable a breadth of design choices, such as CCN/NDN, NetInf and others. What is missing, however, is a concise and deep write-up on this aspect – a long-lived exercise that keeps getting pushed down the line of writing, it seems.
Check out the article through IEEE explore or send an email for a copy.