A Survey of Routing Mechanisms in ICNs

The success of the current Internet architecture over the past decades has been attributed to its simple layered host-centric communication model. Unfortunately, this same design is now posing a significant challenge to newly developed applications such as media streaming, social networking and location-based services that are content- rather than host-centric. Information Centric Networks (ICNs) were introduced to address this challenge by allowing applications to retrieve contents using their names while being agnostic to their physical location. The key enabler to achieving this task is the development of efficient, robust and scalable name-based routing mechanisms. This paper discusses the main requirements of these mechanisms, analyzes existing key name-based routing approaches and highlights future research directions in that area.