Enabling a forwarding plane for future data-centric networks

A lot of attention is being paid to overcoming a number of present Internet limitations, mainly w.r.t. mobility, security, address space exhaustion, and routing table size growth. The continuous patching of the TCP/IP suite with ad-hoc protocol extensions and overlay solutions is regarded as a complex and costly solution in the long term. As a consequence, the so-called “cleanslate” approach to future Internet research has gained a lot of interest. One key question is to what extent a new networking paradigm is really necessary, e.g., as packet switching was to circuit switching in the 70s. The reasoning is based on the large scale use of the Internet for dissemination of named pieces of data [3]. A myriad of devices generate and request content, without caring about the actual data source as long as integrity and authenticity are assured [5]. Such an networking approach has been baptized as “data-oriented” [5], “content-centric” [3] or “information-oriented” networking [1], and aims at shaping the future Internet to interconnect information at large rather than evolving the host-centric architecture. This sets the motivation of my PhD work, the contributions of which are an outgrowth of the efforts and vision of the PSIRP project.