Traffic engineering for information-centric networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) proposes a networking architecture that uses methodologies such as publish-subscribe to achieve a data-oriented approach as opposed to a destination based approach found in the current Internet. This new architecture brings both new problems to be solved and also natural solutions to existing problems. This paper investigates an intra-domain traffic engineering (TE) problem for an information-centric networking (ICN) architecture where a form of source routing is used as the forwarding mechanism. The TE goal is to maximise the residual capacity in the network so that the load is spread evenly. A network flow approach is used and it is shown that the source routing mechanism allows the traffic to be split across multiple paths in a manner that is difficult to achieve using existing IP or IP/MPLS networks. Allowing splittable flows means that a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme can be used that has superior results when compared to existing constraint based routing schemes for flows that cannot be split. Consequently, this work demonstrates that the ICN architecture can simplify the given TE problem in a natural manner.