The Price of Updating the Control Plane in Information-Centric Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the trade-offs between control plane update costs and network performance in Information-Centric Networks, providing a framework to evaluate and minimize overhead in content distribution scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a framework to quantify control-data plane traffic trade-offs and proposes methods to minimize overhead in content-centric network architectures.

Findings

Overhead of control plane updates can outweigh benefits of nearby content fetches.

Framework helps evaluate when control plane updates are justified.

Strategies to reduce update costs in operator-driven CDNs.

Abstract

We are studying some fundamental properties of the interface between control and data planes in Information-Centric Networks. We try to evaluate the traffic between these two planes based on allowing a minimum level of acceptable distortion in the network state representation in the control plane. We apply our framework to content distribution, and see how we can compute the overhead of maintaining the location of content in the control plane. This is of importance to evaluate content-oriented network architectures: we identify scenarios where the cost of updating the control plane for content routing overwhelms the benefit of fetching a nearby copy. We also show how to minimize the cost of this overhead when associating costs to peering traffic and to internal traffic for operator-driven CDNs.