VCCN: Virtual content-centric networking for realizing group-based communication

Data-centric networking has recently been getting increased attention. A representative design of data-centric networking is CCN (Content-Centric Networking), which routes packets within a network based on their content identifiers. CCN is basically designed to be open because ease of data reuse is one of the greatest advantages of data-centric networking. However, being used for real-world networking, completely open data-centric networking is not sufficient. It is required to realize closed communication within a group of users. In this paper, we propose Virtual Content-Centric Networking (VCCN), which realizes closed communication within a group of users with CCN router virtualization. This paper presents four building blocks of VCCN: extension of the content identifier, CCN router virtualization, packet transport between virtualized CCN routers, and Social Network Services cooperative user/group identification. Moreover, we implemented VCCN´s basic features by extending the CCNx software and performed a preliminary performance evaluation of our VCCN implementation.