Towards a Minimal Core for Information-Centric Networking

The question of whether there exists a minimal model for information-centric networking (ICN), that allows the bulk of features of various recent ICN architectures to be expressed as independent extensions to the model, is largely unexplored. Finding such core would yield more orthogonality of the features, better adaptability to the changing multi-stakeholder environment of the Internet, and improved interoperability between ICN architectures. In this paper, we introduce the concept of information space as a potential solution, which is based on the sharing of information and late binding service composition of decoupled entities as the essence of information-centrism. The specified framework is an abstract model without dependencies to low-level implementation details and achieves minimality by leaving naming and content security outside the core. This approach makes the experimentation of new features above and their implementation below faster and provides a possible evolutionary kernel for