A survey on Information-centric Networking: Rationales, designs and debates

The basic function of the Internet is to delivery data (what) to serve the needs of all applications. IP names the attachment points (where) to facilitate ubiquitous interconnectivity as the current way to deliver data. The fundamental mismatch between data delivery and naming attachment points leads to a lot of challenges, e.g., mapping from data name to IP address, handling dynamics of underlying topology, scaling up the data distribution, and securing communication, etc. Information-centric networking (ICN) is proposed to shift the focus of communication paradigm from where to what, by making the named data the first-class citizen in the network, The basic consensus of ICN is to name the data independent from its container (space dimension) and session (time dimension), which breaks the limitation of point-to-point IP semantic. It scales up data distribution by utilizing available resources, and facilitates communication to fit diverse connectivity and heterogeneous networks. However, there are only a few consensuses on the detailed design of ICN, and quite a few different ICN architectures are proposed. This paper reveals the rationales of ICN from the perspective of the Internet evolution, surveys different design choices, and discusses on two debatable topics in ICN, i.e., self-certifying versus hierarchical names, and edge versus pervasive caching. We hope this survey helps clarify some mis-understandings on ICN and achieve more consensuses.