A novel overlay architecture for Information Centric Networking

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Information Centric Networks (ICN) has emerged as a new Internet paradigm where the users are being provided seamless access to contents rather than the host as in classical approach. For ICN realization, the current Internet requires architectural changes. These changes must be incorporated such that existing applications continue running without any difficulties. In this paper, we introduce a novel ICN architecture, called Overlay Information Centric Networks (O-ICN), which separates the data plane from the control plane activities of the network. Unlike the usual ICN architectures, in our approach naming and routing (control plane) functionalities have been segregated from the caching (data plane) functionality at each ICN router. We introduce a new module called an ICN Manager which is an extended version of Domain Name System (DNS) server and performs name resolution along with routing functionalities for ICN type of requests as well as the normal DNS resolution for non-ICN type of requests. The O-ICN architecture can be deployed incrementally over the current Internet and can operate both as ICN and non-ICN/legacy network simultaneously. This can also be implemented both in Software Defined Networks (SDN) as well as non-SDN networks without much modifications. The proposed architecture provides benefits in terms of simplification of network management, vendor independent solution, better use of network resources in terms of bandwidth and delay, and reduction of deployment/operational cost of the network.