Bridging the ICN Deployment Gap with IPoC: An IP-over-ICN protocol for 5G Networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a new networking model that addresses content directly rather than addressing end-hosts. An ICN-based networking layer aligns better with application needs; it provides content-centric security, caching, and intelligent packet forwarding making it useful to both users and service providers alike in terms of efficiency, security, and mobility. ICN has recently received considerable attention; researchers have explored its benefits for diverse use cases such as large-data applications, building automation systems, vehicular networks, and IoT applications. While ICN provides significant benefits to all these application areas, one significant challenge that remains to be addressed is real-world deployment. An ICN-only network will require all IP applications to be rewritten to use ICN natively, a tall order in a world with millions of applications connected to the Internet. Though this problem affects all IP applications, we use mobile applications as the driving example for this work. An ICN based network can benefit smartphone users with higher throughput and lower service interruptions and at the same time, allow mobile service providers to utilize their network better and reduce protocol complexity. In this paper, we propose IPoC, a general purpose tunneling protocol that enables all IP applications to utilize ICN networks. We implement the IPoC protocol using Named Data Networking (NDN) semantics and using mobile communication as the driving example, compare our protocol performance with native IP. We show that the protocol overhead and performance degradation of IPoC is minimal which makes it suitable for immediate deployment. In return, we show how NDN and IPoC can bring ICN benefits to 5G mobile networks by simplifying the mobility plane, introducing intelligent functionality, and reducing network complexity.