Supporting Information-Centric Networking in SDN data center network

Abstract

The main design principle of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is the name based routing, that makes users able to ask for a data object by only using its name, and makes the network deliver data to users from a nearby cache if in-network caching is available. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) decouples the control layer from the data layer, so that the complexity, and network control and management cost are reduced, which provides flexible development environment. ICN deployment needs that environment due to its entirely different architecture. In this paper, the design and implementation of the ICN functionalities over data center SDN network is presented, which is i) provide efficient content delivery with transmission delay lower than that in traditional network, ii) allow hosts to requests contents by using names only, iii) prove SDN feasibility to implement ICN with higher throughput and acceptable packet loss and jitter in comparison with traditional networks, which are implemented using the same emulation tool and the same network devices (switches are used instead of routers to make identical network to SDN network) as that in ICN over SDN network, iv) the design dose not required modifying the OpenFlow protocol so the use of IP is still available.