Supporting Information-Centric Networking in SDN

Recently the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has attracted increasing attention in the research community around the world. In this paper, we focus on how to modify the OpenFlow protocol, the most popular SDN instantiation, and use SDN functions to enable Information-Centric Networking (ICN). We describe the design based on CCNx (a virtual experiment network based on the concept of ICN), Floodlight (a kind of SDN controller) and a revised Open Vswitch (a virtual switch in SDN). We build a testbed that i) allows to identify the content requests, ii) realizes the routing process of ICN in SDN, iii) enables efficient content delivery, iv) is able to be deployed in existing IP networks. In addition, the proposed paradigm continues to support traditional host-to-host communication using TCP/IP. We will present how Open Vswitch should be altered to better match the Operations of CCNx and how CCNx can be implemented over the modified OpenFlow Network.