IP Over ICN Goes Live

TL;DR

This paper reports on the successful deployment of an IP-over-ICN architecture in a real production network, demonstrating improved performance and resilience for IP-based services without requiring full ICN adoption.

Contribution

It presents a practical implementation and trial of a hybrid IP-over-ICN architecture, showcasing real-world benefits and operational viability.

Findings

Improved network performance observed in the trial.

Enhanced resilience of IP services over ICN.

Successful real-world deployment with actual users.

Abstract

Information-centric networking (ICN) has long been advocating for radical changes to the IP-based Internet. However, the upgrade challenges that this entails have hindered ICN adoption. To break this loop, the POINT project proposed a hybrid, IP-over-ICN, architecture: IP networks are preserved at the edge, connected to each other over an ICN core. This exploits the key benefits of ICN, enabling individual network operators to improve the performance of their IP-based services, without changing the rest of the Internet. We provide an overview of POINT and outline how it improves upon IP in terms of performance and resilience. Our focus is on the successful trial of the POINT prototype in a production network, where real users operated actual IP-based applications.