From Name-Centric to Information-Centric Networking

In a quite short time after its envisioning, Information Centric Networking paradigm seems to be a standing reality: name-driven primitives have been defined to support networking functionalities and a few architectures have been implemented. In fact, a content consumer can now search for a data item by name and completely disregard its IP address. But the question to raise is: is this searching mechanism really information-centric or is it rather name-centric only? This paper defines the requirements enabling the transition to a paradigm for content exchange which is exclusively based on information. A running example, based on the Web of Data, has been illustrated to describe the key functionalities of the proposed approach. The envisioned solution grounds on a mechanism to embed content in names which, notably, is architecture-agnostic and can run on top of all existing ICN flavors designed so far. This mechanism supports a semantic-based retrieval of content, that returns a list of contents potentially satisfying the consumer, incrementing retrieval precision and recall. The enhancement in terms of recall comes at the cost of a communication overhead, which has been analytically modeled and estimated in this paper.