A Framework for experimenting content caching and distribution in ICN over SDN

Information (or Content) Centric Networking (ICN or CCN) is a new logical and an architectural solution for networking. It originates from the consideration that people value the Internet for thecontent it contains and not for where this content comes from. In this work, we are referring to our ICN based architecture which is called CONET (COntent NETwork). The thesis work covers several aspects on expanding the proposed architecture and addressing the issue of its deployment starting from the current IP networks. Thie is still an open issue, and different approaches have been proposedin the past. The contributions of this work have been classified in the upcoming few major points. The first is the proposal of a solution to support ICN paradigm leveraging the SDN concepts. Our approach is specifically designed to support the ICN framework called CONET, however the underlying ideas and concepts are general and applicable to the ICN proposals which follow the basic mode of operation of CCN/NDN approach. We have implemented our solution combining and extending Open Source tools. In the time frame in which this work has been conceived and developed, the available OpenFlow testbeds and the Open Source tools werebased on OpenFlow 1.0 specification, therefore we had to design the solution and the experiment taking into account the features that were available on off-the-shelf OpenFlow equipment. We discuss also the realization of advanced caching policies like Tag Based Forwarding Filter (TBFF), Dynamic Tag Based Forwarding (DTBF) and FIX (P) over the designed architecture. Caching policies are needed to optimize the use of the resource, because it is not possible in general to cache of all the items. The second contribution of this work concerns the design and implementation of an open source environment for the emulation of the proposed solutions over OpenFlow distributed testbeds (OFELIA – like) and its adaptation for the single host emulation over Mininet. The emulation environment includes also a web GUI framework for the monitoring of the experiments, which is capable to monitor at run time the traffic and the cached items in the network, and to provide tools for evaluating the performance of the proposed solutions.