Experimental testbeds on Information-Centric Networking -

Recent Internet multimedia applications are characterized by an increasing trend in the number of users creating, storing, sharing and consuming a larger number of bigger content. With the introduction of new types of content (higher quality, richer content, networked media …), Future Internet applications and services will be more and more demanding on the underlying infrastructures.

To accommodate Future Internet applications/services, national projects in United States such as Named Data Networking (NDN) and eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) have been focusing on content-centric or content-oriented networking by academia. Japan and Europe have also for the last years conducted very close and complementing research and developments on information-centric networking and efficient media distribution technologies driven by industry and academia consortium. Yet, there are still unsolved issues, especially when facing current and future worldwide end-to-end use cases.

Global experimentation, with close to reality setup and constraints, is required to be able to identify and reproduce known or unknown limitations and problems; and to test and validate new solutions (protocols, architectures, …) from the network layer up to the application layer.

Scope

Research and Innovation Actions

The overall objective is to develop frameworks, architectures, protocols or tools for efficient media and content distribution on content-centric networking and enable the experimentation by building a large scale global Information-Centric Networking (ICN) testbed. The proposals must cover joint work on connecting and federating key existing ICN and related testbeds in Europe and Japan, or other regions, building upon previous research results, tools and framework (e.g. CUTEi, Fed4Fire, Contrace, Testman, Felix, Green-ICN …). The proposals must be based on strong cooperation between academia and industry, in order to clearly demonstrate mutual interests for future Internet services. When appropriate, enhancement of recent developments of existing ICN architectures (e.g. outcomes of the NDN or XIA projects) can be considered. A dedicated attention should be put on the experimenters experience and interaction. The proposals should also contribute to the definition of open standards and common APIs (Application Programming Interface) to ensure world-scale interoperability in the domain.

The Commission considers that proposals for project duration of 3 years and requesting a contribution from the EU of EUR 1.3 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts or duration.

• Enabling global scale experimentation, with very large testing capacities (content type/amount/number of sources/consumers …) for the distribution and management of networked media, rich and large contents requesting high to very high data rate communication among a large number of consumers.
• Identification and validation of interoperable technologies for ICN.
• Validation of new framework, architectures or protocols for ICN.
• Influence and contribute to testbeds federation at the global level.

International cooperation

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