From content delivery today to Information Centric Networking

Today, content delivery is a heterogeneous ecosystem composed by various independent infrastructures. The ever increasing growth of Internet traffic has encouraged the prolifer- ation of different architectures to serve content provider needs and user demand. Despite the differences among the technology, their low level implementation can be characterized in a few fundamental building blocks: network storage, request routing, and data transfer. Existing solutions are inefficient because they try to build an information centric service model over a network infrastructure which was designed to support host-to-host commu- nications. The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm has been proposed as a pos- sible solution to this mismatch. ICN integrates content delivery as a native network feature. The rationale is to architect a network that automatically interprets, processes, and delivers content (information) independently of its location. This paper makes the following contri- butions: (1) it identifies a set of building blocks for content delivery, (2) it surveys the most popular approaches to realize the above building blocks, (3) it compares content delivery solutions relying on the current Internet infrastructure with novel ICN approaches.