Pedestrian crossing: The long and winding road toward fair cross-comparison of ICN quality

While numerous Information Centric Networking (ICN) architectures have been proposed over the last years, the community has so far only timidly attempted at a quantitative assessment of the relative quality of service level that users are expected to enjoy in each of them. This paper starts a journey toward the cross comparison of ICN alternatives, making several contributions along this road. Specifically, a census of 20 ICN software tools reveals that about 10 are dedicated to a specific architecture, about half of which are simulators. Second, we survey ICN research papers using simulation to gather information concerning the used simulator, finding that a large fraction either uses custom proprietary and unavailable software, or even plainly fails to mention any information on this regard, which is deceiving. Third, we cross-compare some of the available simulators, finding that they achieve consistent results, which is instead encouraging. Fourth, we propose a methodology to increase and promote cross-comparison, which is within reach but requires community-wide agreement, promotion and enforcement.