A framework for experimenting ICN over SDN solutions using physical and virtual testbeds

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a paradigm in which the network layer provides users with access to content by names, instead of providing communication channels between hosts. The ICN paradigm promises to offer a set of advantages with respect to existing (IP) networks for the support of the large majority of current traffic. In this paper, we consider the deployment of ICN by exploiting the Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture. SDN is characterized by a logically centralized control plane and a well-defined separation between data and control planes. An SDN-enabled network facilitates the introduction of ICN functionality, without requiring a complex transition strategy and the re-deployment of new ICN capable hardware. More in details, in this paper we provide: i) a solution to support ICN by exploiting SDN, extending a previous work of ours; ii) design and implement an open reference environment to deploy and test the ICN over SDN solutions over local and distributed testbeds; iii) design and implementation of a set of Caching policies that leverage on the ICN over SDN approach; iv) performance evaluation of key aspects of the ICN over SDN architecture and of the designed caching policies. All the source code and the monitoring suite are publicly available. To the best of our knowledge, there are no other similar solutions available in Open Source, nor similar emulation platforms, including also a comprehensive set of monitoring tools.