Abstract

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has seen a significant resur-gence in recent years. ICN promises benefits to users and ser-vice providers along several dimensions (e.g., performance, secu-rity, and mobility). These benefits, however, come at a non-trivial cost as many ICN proposals envision adding significant complex-ity to the network by having routers serve as content caches and support nearest-replica routing. This paper is driven by the simple question of whether this additional complexity is justified and if we can achieve these benefits in an incrementally deployable fash-ion. To this end, we use trace-driven simulations to analyze the quantitative benefits attributed to ICN (e.g., lower latency and con-gestion). Somewhat surprisingly, we find that pervasive caching and nearest-replica routing are not fundamentally necessary—most of the performance benefits can be achieved with simpler caching architectures. We also discuss how the qualitative benefits of ICN (e.g., security, mobility) can be achieved without any changes to the network. Building on these insights, we present a proof-of-concept design of an incrementally deployable ICN architecture.