'This breakthrough is very exciting for us. In just six months we have developed a truly unique demonstration which is able to use standard IP end-points and translate the IP flow into an IP-over-ICN abstraction (publish/subscribe model), where a single hop within the ICN network used SDN switches with pre-installed forwarding rules for the ICN flows,' says Dirk Trossen, Principal Scientist at InterDigital and POINT's Technical Manager. The POINT project kicked off in January 2015 and is supported by the EU to the tune of EUR 3.5 million.

ICN, which stands for Information Centric Network, has been the focus of many research teams since 2006 for its potential to replace the IP-based Internet as we know it. ICN notably allows for content to be fetched from multiple servers and caches, for savings in the synchronous and quasi-synchronous delivery of popular content, for securing the content rather than the endpoint, and for allowing operators to apply traffic engineering rules.

However the requirements of such a switch – including heavy standardisation, strong stakeholder support and the fact that viable methods to create a truly scalable internetworking of individual ICN highlands has not yet been found – have cast doubt on its feasibility.

The best of both worlds

To overcome this obstacle, POINT tries another approach. Instead of seeking to replace Internet Protocol (IP)-based networks, the project aims to harness the innovation potential of IP-based applications and solutions, while benefitting from specific ICN solutions in terms of their potential for better performance compared to their IP-based counterparts. At its core is the fundamental question: Is an IP-over-ICN system a better solution for IP-based services than pure IP-based networks?

A customer use case in the project's presentation flyer helps to illustrate the POINT approach: John, a London priest wanting to reach out to older parishioners whose health doesn't allow them to attend services in person, would like to set up a live video streaming service to fulfil this need. Unfortunately his bandwidth is not high enough, and paid streaming services are too expensive. He reluctantly chooses to use YouTube despite his fear of losing his content rights and sends over the data, thereby enabling a high number of users to view the video simultaneously. With the POINT software, John could have created a unicast stream received by users as a multicast stream, meaning he wouldn't have to worry about his bandwidth anymore, and could do without both paid and free streaming services.

While the project still has much to do to prove that IP-over-ICN surpasses IP-based networks, the demonstration made this week at the Rhine-Westphalia Institute of Technology in Aachen is already a great achievement. Thanks to Blackadder, an ICN core implementation developed by the award-winning, FP7-funded PURSUIT project, participants were able to connect to a Network Attachment Point (NAP) – a system performing the IP-to-ICN translation via an IP-over-ICN abstraction and offering standard IP access via Ethernet (server) and Wi-Fi (clients) – via Wi-Fi using devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops.

POINT will end in January 2018, a couple of years before the expected launch of 5G services in Europe. By then, the team intends to perform a large scale trial of its IP-over-ICN model on an operational network in Cyprus.

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