draft-corujo-icn-mgmt-03.txt

ICNRG                                                          D. Corujo
Internet-Draft                             Instituto de Telecomunicacoes
Intended status: Informational                            K. Pentikousis
Expires: August 18, 2014                                            EICT
                                                                I. Vidal
                                                       J. Garcia-Reinoso
                                                                    UC3M
                                                              S. Lederer
                                      Alpen-Adria Universitat Klagenfurt
                                                               S. Spirou
                                                        Intracom Telecom
                                                       February 14, 2014


                     ICN Management Considerations
                        draft-corujo-icn-mgmt-03

Abstract

   Motivated by the need to find and evaluate better ways for reaching
   on-line content in upcoming Future Internet environments, ICN has
   been increasingly deployed in an broad range of research and
   experimental actions.  Some deployments even go as far as subjecting
   ICN to new scenarios beyond content-reaching, exposing the
   flexibility of ICN core primitives in supporting such mechanisms.  In
   this sense, besides analyzing and discussing the role of network
   management procedures in ICN environments, this document also
   analyzes possibilities on how intrinsic core ICN mechanisms can be
   reutilized for network management.  We consider that the availability
   of management mechanisms for ICN will foster their deployment and, as
   such, should be tackled still in the design and experimentation
   phases.  Perhaps ICN can adapt successful mechanisms from the host-
   centric paradigm, or new network management schemes can be designed.
   Perhaps even both.  This document centralizes that discussion,
   drawing the attention of the ICNRG community to this underdeveloped
   area of research in ICN.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.





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   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  ICN Management Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     2.1.  A Management Framework for NDN - The Face Management
           Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
       2.1.1.  NDN Management Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
         2.1.1.1.  Discovery Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
         2.1.1.2.  Management Data Exchange  . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
       2.1.2.  Implementation Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     2.2.  Video Adaptation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
       2.2.1.  Adaptive Delivery of Multimedia Content in ICN  . . .  11
     2.3.  Content Management  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
     2.4.  Network Policies  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
       2.4.1.  NetInf Management Considerations  . . . . . . . . . .  14
     2.5.  Cache Management  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
   3.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
   4.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   6.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18








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1.  Introduction

   Information-centric networking (ICN) enables new ideas for naming and
   addressing, privacy, security, and trust, and should also lead us to
   think new ways for deploying, operating and managing networks in the
   future.  By default, users, programs, information objects and hosts
   are in general untrustworthy and mobile in an information-centric
   network.  This means that many of the assumptions in traditional
   network management, including all aspects of FCAPS (Fault,
   Configuration, Accounting, Performance, and Security) need to be
   rethought.  However, despite the different instantiations of ICN
   architectures, and the plethora of novel research work built on top
   of them, little attention has been paid to management aspects so far.
   This includes both enabling "traditional" network management
   operations (which work well from small networks to large
   infrastructure networks), and supporting and optimizing intrinsic
   procedures of the ICN fabric.

   This document aims to draw the attention of ICNRG to the importance
   of network management for real-world deployments.  Today, network
   management is practically an add-on to host-centric deployments.  We
   can do better as we move forward in ICN research considering the full
   range of deployments from home-office environments to challenged
   networks to tier-1 networks.  To this end, we draft some first
   management considerations that, on the one hand, capitalize on ICN
   concepts for defining management procedures and, on the other,
   explore the possibilities for defining a common management framework
   irrespective of the ICN approach taken.  We reckon that the later is
   a much more formidable task and we are looking forward to tackling it
   together with other members of ICNRG.  In this document, different
   ICN research aspects tackled by ICNRG members are analyzed in respect
   to management possibilities and impact.

   We argue that addressing management at an early stage is not only
   important for real-world adoption and the successful future
   deployment of ICN, but also to deal with scenarios where management
   can simplify, enhance or optimize ICN network utilization and
   performance.  The subject becomes particularly challenging, as
   disparate characteristics from different ICN approaches (e.g., in
   terms of namespace, granularity, routing, and so on) impact the
   definition and design of these management mechanisms.  Section 2
   below provides an initial assessment, showcasing considerations on
   Face Management Section 2.1, Video Adaptation Section 2.2, Content
   Management Section 2.3, Network Policies Section 2.4 and Cache
   Management Section 2.5.

   We plan to incrementally develop the draft, incorporating
   considerations on other ICN aspects as well as different approaches



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   (e.g., [PURSUIT] and [NetInf]) as well as address other pertinent
   aspects as we receive feedback from the research group members.

2.  ICN Management Considerations

   This section addresses management considerations regarding specific
   ICN deployments and scenarios, by analyzing the opportunities,
   requirements and possibilities for management deployment therein.
   This analysis starts with the proposal of a NDN-based face management
   framework, followed by considerations from video adaptation, content
   management and network policies scenarios.

2.1.  A Management Framework for NDN - The Face Management Example

   The Named Data Networking [NDN] ICN architecture provides a new
   communication framework built on named data.  Like other ICN
   counterparts, such as [NetInf], [PURSUIT] and [DONA], NDN
   intrinsically supports security, routing/forwarding, reliability,
   caching and even mobility, aiming at scalable and more efficient
   content-distribution than today's IP-based approaches.  Fostered by
   an open-source implementation [CCNx], NDN has been at the heart of an
   active topic with several research contributions evaluating its
   deployment feasibility and performance in a number of scenarios
   [ICN-Scenarios].

   NDN introduces the concept of a Strategy Layer, which can control
   Interest packet forwarding behavior.  It basically determines which
   is the best interface (or set of interfaces) to send an Interest
   packet.  The "strategy" component establishes a pre-configured
   algorithm for tackling Interest packet decisions, ranging from
   sending it sequentially on each interface until a Data packet is
   received, to evaluating which interfaces provide better performance
   (i.e., lower average RTT) in retrieving certain content (as discussed
   in [NDN]).

   It is important to keep in mind that NDN replaces the commonly used
   term "interface" with the term "face", since packets can be forwarded
   over hardware network interfaces as well as between application
   interfaces, further acknowledging the information dissemination
   capabilities of ICN.  This aspect is considered in [NDN] and [NDN-R],
   where programs can be associated to the NDN governing structures
   (like the FIB), defining configurations such as "sendToAll" and
   "sendToBest" with respect to managing the content reaching process.
   Corujo et al.  [NDN-MGMT] exploit these concepts enabling management
   mechanisms to be deployed, and steer network operations and NDN
   operation, as described in the following section.





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   An important aspect supporting network management procedures is the
   interaction of network information residing at the network side with
   information about the network from the perspective of clients
   connected to it.  The former includes, for instance, information
   stored in the network operator core about user profiles, associated
   policies, or data collected by the access network equipment, such as
   current and past traffic load levels, active flows, and maintenance
   information.  Today, such information can be retrieved for management
   and operation support through dedicated signaling protocols (e.g.,
   [RFC1157], [RFC6733]), or Operation Support Services (OSS) web
   services.  The client point of view of the network includes
   information that, for example, a wireless terminal can provide,
   indicating wireless link quality, average return-trip times (RTT) or
   perceived Quality of Experience (QoE).

   Both types of information can be capitalized upon allowing, for
   example, the network to coordinate network management procedures,
   considering as input information obtained from other network elements
   as well as from user nodes.  One way to generate management
   information in network entities and at client nodes, as well as to
   consume and act upon it (i.e., using the management information
   exchange as a control channel) is to couple NDN nodes with Management
   Agent (MA) entities.

   Fig. 1 (redrawn here from [NDN-MGMT] for convenience) illustrates how
   a MA can be deployed in both network and client entities, interfacing
   with different operational aspects and protocol layers of an NDN
   node.  By using NDN content reaching and disseminating mechanisms,
   management information can be consumed by the MA to steer not only
   the behavior of application processes and network interfaces, but
   also to interface with NDN supporting structures (i.e. Content Store
   (CS), Forward Information Base (FIB) and Pendint Interest
   Table (PIT).  Effectively, different kinds of information can be
   conveyed to a network node responsible for managing the network
   (under different perspectives and processes), and resubmitted back
   towards client nodes, affecting the way applications interface with
   network interfaces and the NDN fabric.














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    NDN Fabric
      +------------------------------------------+
      |                                   Face 0 |
      | +--------------+                   +---+ |  +------+
      | |Content Store |      ptr/type     |  <---->|WLAN  |
      | +------------^-+      +-+----+     +---+ |  +------+
      |              +---------+|    |    Face 1 |
      | +--------------+      +------+     +---+ |  +------+
      | |Pending      <--------+|    |     |  <---->|LTE   |
      | |Interest Table|      +------+     +---+ |  +------+
      | +--------------+      | |    |    Face i |
      |                       +------+     +---+ |  +------+
      | +--------------+      | |    |     |  <---->| MA   |
      | |Forward       |      +------+     +---+ |  +------+
      | |Information <---------+|    |    Face j |
      | |Base          |      +-+----+     +---+ |  +------+
      | +--------------+                   |  <---->|VoIP  |
      |                                    +---+ |  |Video |
      +------------------------------------------+  +------+

      Figure 1.  NDN Management Framework

   MA can interface with the PIT and FIB structures, acting as a
   dynamic, application- and/or network-controlled interface to the
   strategy layer.  This could also be used to direct how to forward NDN
   Interest and Data packets, in a configurable manner.  Regarding
   network interfaces, the MA can interface with them not only to
   control (i.e., initiate wireless access scanning procedures), but
   also to collect information (i.e., an informational event regarding
   detected access points).  Finally, the MA can also interface with
   application processes, drawing out information about the perceived
   QoS/QoE (e.g., lost packets or delay from a real-time video feed) and
   also to execute commands, such as selecting a better video codec when
   the network commands the video flow to be accessed from a different
   wireless access interface.

   Conversely, MA entities residing in network equipment can provide
   informational events as well, but related to network-side link layer
   characteristics (such as number of attached nodes or load), as well
   as accepting commands from the network (i.e., activate maintenance
   procedures).  Management processes residing in the network core can
   leverage information collected from applications, client terminals
   and network equipment, to drive optimization procedures.  Such
   optimization procedures can also tap into other entities, containing
   complementary information such as policies and subscription
   information, and use it to produce an overall network decision, which
   can then be forwarded to multiple client nodes, in a policy enforcing
   way.



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   An important consideration from the NDN architecture, is the
   hierarchical namespace, allowing nodes to request and convey
   management data, by simply using an appropriate prefix (e.g., ccn://
   domain/management/ME).

   By leveraging the NDN information-centric dissemination mechanisms to
   convey management information and commands as content, these
   management extensions inherit the intrinsic capabilities of the NDN
   architecture, including security and reliability, which are
   fundamental for management procedures.

2.1.1.  NDN Management Operations

   In order to implement management operations, besides the interfacing
   capabilities of the MA entity mentioned in the previous section, a
   management framework needs other supporting mechanisms in order to
   provide the envisioned management capabilities, while maintaining the
   inherent NDN capabilities.  Concretely, when nodes connect to the
   network, the management entities need to become aware of the
   management capabilities of the newly-connected node.  In addition, an
   asynchronous information exchange capability needs to be provided,
   allowing not only the request of management information, but also the
   ability to push information towards a remote node (i.e., sending a
   command or an informational event).

2.1.1.1.  Discovery Procedure

   The discovery procedure is illustrated in Fig. 2 (redrawn from
   [NDN-MGMT]), and borrows for the procedures described in [NDN-VOIP].
   The procedure starts with the newly connected User Equipment (UE)
   broadcasting an Interest packet (Fig. 2:1) perhaps with a well-known
   content name (e.g., ccn://domain/management/mgmt-case/ME) to its
   local network.


















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     +-------+                                     +------------+
     |+--+   |                                     |       +---+|
     ||MA| UE|                                     |Network|ME ||
     |+--+   |                                     |       +---+|
     +-|-----+                                     +------------+
       |(1) INTEREST                                        |
       |-/domain/management/mgmt-case/ME ------------------>|
       |                                                    |
       |(2) DATA                                            |
       |<-/domain/management/mgmtm-case/ME------------------|
       |(Signature, ME-publisher-id, key locator            |
       | DATA:supported security mechanisms)                |
       |                                                    |
       |(3) INTEREST                                        |
       |-/domain/management/mgmt-case/ME/MA-published-id/ ->|
       |(encrypted with ME's PK:security-mechanism, SKey)   |
       |                                                    |
       |(4) DATA                                            |
       |<-/domain/management/mgmt-case/ME/MA-publisher-id/--|
       |(encrypted with ME's PK:security-mechanism, SKey)   |
       | DATA: Session Key received                         |
       |                                                    |
       |(5) INTEREST                                        |
       |<-/domain/management/mgmt-case/MA-publisher-id/-----|
       |  /nonce (encrypted)                                |
       |                                                    |
       |(6) DATA                                            |
       |-/domain/management/mgmt-case/MA-publisher-id/----->|
       |  /nonce (encrypted)                                |
       | DATA: Encrypted nonce received                     |


       Figure 2. Secure Management Session Establishment

   The "mgmt-case" part of the name can be used to select different
   aspects of management capabilities allowed by a Management Entity
   (ME) (i.e., a management decision point in the network).  The ME then
   replies to this Interest with a Data packet (Fig. 2:2), providing its
   shorthand identifier (i.e., ME-publisher-key) and a key locator,
   indicating how to retrieve its public key (assuming it is authorized
   by another key trusted by the UE).  In this way, the MA at the UE
   recognizes the ME as a valid signer (and provider) of management
   content.

   A session key, Ks, is generated by the MA, considering an encryption
   algorithm from the ones indicated by the ME in the Data packet.  The
   MA then expresses its desire to receive (and reply to) Interests
   matching a specific NDN name associated with the management service



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   (e.g., ccn://domain/management/mgmt-case/ME/MA-publisher-id), where
   MA-publisher-id uniquely and globally identifies the MA, through a
   cryptographic digest of its public key.  After this, the MA sends an
   Interest packet (Fig. 2:3) to retrieve management Data from the ME
   containing the short-hand identifier of the MA (MA-publisher-id), the
   chosen encryption algorithm and session key (Ks), both encrypted with
   the public key of the ME.  In this way, the confidentiality of the
   content exchanged between the ME and the MA is guaranteed.  The ME
   responds with a Data packet (Fig. 2:4) signaling the reception of the
   session Key.

   Before the actual exchange of management data begins, the ME
   generates a challenge (i.e., a nonce) which is sent via an Interest
   packet (Fig. 2:5) to the MA, indicating through a named data name
   that it requests the reception of the response to this challenge,
   sent by the MA using a Data packet (Fig. 2:6).  This allows the ME,
   after verifying the signature of the Data packet, to verify that the
   encryption algorithm and the session key are valid for the MA, making
   it ready to exchange information for coordinating management
   procedures in the network.

2.1.1.2.  Management Data Exchange

   After the discovery and security establishment procedures have been
   finalized, the framework provides the capability for both the MA and
   the ME to securely obtain management content from one another.

   In order to push unsolicited content, a dual Interest/Data procedure
   can maintain compatibility with the Interest and Data exchange/
   consumption of the NDN architecture.  Fig. 3 (redrawn from Fig.2 of
   [NDN-MGMT]) illustrates the procedure which is initiated by the MA.
   In this case, the MA intends to push management information to the
   ME.  It does so via an Interest packet manifesting its interest in
   receiving management content with a local sequence number.  This
   sequencing allows the recovery of new content over cached content.
   If the ME is interested in retrieving content from the MA, it answers
   back with a Data packet, where it indicates that it is willing to
   receive management content.  Then, the ME sends an Interest packet to
   retrieve the management data with the sequence number provided by the
   MA, which responds with a Data packet containing the information it
   wanted to push into the ME.










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     +-------+                                     +------------+
     |+--+   |                                     |       +---+|
     ||MA| UE|                                     |Network|ME ||
     |+--+   |                                     |       +---+|
     +-|-----+                                     +------------+
       |(1) INTEREST                                        |
       |-/domain/management/faces/MA-publisher-id/seq_num-->|
       |                                                    |
       |(2) DATA                                            |
       |<-/domain/management/faces/MA-publisher-id/seq_num--|
       |(Signature)                                         |
       | DATA:content seq_num accepted                      |
       |                                                    |
       |(3) INTEREST                                        |
       |<-/domain/management/faces/MA-publisher-id/seq_num--|
       |                                                    |
       |(4) DATA                                            |
       |-/domain/management/mgmt-case/ME/MA-publisher-id/-->|
       |(Signature)                                         |
       | DATA: management data (encrypted with Ks)          |
       |                                                    |

     Figure 3. Content Management Push

2.1.2.  Implementation Experience

   As a proof-of-concept, a software prototype of the management
   framework, [NDNFlexManager] was developed for [NDN-MGMT], using the
   CCNx Java API [CCNx].  At this stage, it includes the support of the
   discovery procedure described in Section Section 2.1.1.1, as well as
   the management data exchange operations outlined in
   Section Section 2.1.1.2.  The framework provides an API to easy the
   development of management applications, i.e., MAs and MEs, which can
   request and push unsolicited content to each other, related with
   management operations.

   To validate this basic prototype, [NDN-MGMT] considered a specific
   use case supported by the framework, i.e., face management.  This
   entails configuring and selecting an appropriate face in a UE to
   retrieve a given content.  Based on the CCNx, an evaluation test-bed
   was deployed including an NDN UE (featuring an MA and a set of
   network interfaces), a content server and a network node (featuring
   an ME).  These entities are interconnected by a set of NDN routers.
   The purpose of the evaluation scenario is to demonstrate feasibility
   for the protocol exchanges mentioned earlier.  Note that the code has
   been tested in a small-scale environment where the ME is topology-
   aware and keeps track of conditions of the access networks that are
   available to the UE.  Thus, the ME can provide the MA with management



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   information reporting the appropriate face for content retrieval, or
   an alternative point of access that could be used to improve the
   performance.  The MA uses the management information to reconfigure
   the FIB (and possibly the network interfaces) in the UE, setting the
   appropriate face to forward subsequent Interests.

   For validation purposes, a local application was also implemented at
   the NDN UE that works similarly to a ping utility, generating
   periodic Interests that match a given prefix (served by the content
   server), and computing the Round Trip Time of each Interest/Data
   exchange.  The RTT values obtained by this application in [NDN-MGMT],
   indicate that the performance that can be achieved by using the NDN
   management framework in the considered evaluation scenario is
   satisfactory, given the early stage of this work.  Further
   development and testing is ongoing.

2.2.  Video Adaptation

   This section investigates ICN management considerations for the
   delivery of video data, and especially the adaptive delivery of
   video.  From a content perspective, multimedia is omnipresent in the
   Internet, e.g., producing 62% of the total Internet traffic in North
   America's fixed access networks [GIPR2013].

   Video, and multimedia content in general, is has specific
   characteristics, which have to be considered and where network
   management consideration are necessary.  The consumption of
   multimedia content comes along with timing requirements for the
   delivery of the content, for both, live and on-demand consumption.
   Long startup delays, buffering periods or poor quality, etc. should
   be avoided to achieve a good Quality of Experience of the consumer of
   the content.  Of course, these requirements are heavily influenced by
   routing decision and caching, which are central parts of ICN, and
   which may be leveraged more efficiently by an intelligent network
   management.

2.2.1.  Adaptive Delivery of Multimedia Content in ICN

   Today's dominant streaming systems are based on the common approach
   of leveraging HTTP-based Internet infrastructures, which are
   consequently based on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the
   Internet Protocol (IP).  Especially the adaptive multimedia streaming
   (AMS) via HTTP is gaining more and more momentum and resulted in the
   standardization of MPEG-DASH [MPEG-DASH], which stands for Dynamic
   Adaptive Streaming over HTTP.  The basic idea of AHS is to split up
   the media file into segments of equal length, which can be encoded at
   different resolutions, bitrates, etc.  The segments are stored on
   conventional HTTP Web server and can be accessed through HTTP GET



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   requests from the client.  Due to this, the streaming system is pull
   based and the entire streaming logic is on the client side.  This
   means that the client fully controls the bitrate of the streaming
   media on a per-segment basis, which has several advantages, e.g., the
   client knows its bandwidth requirements and capabilities best.  As
   one can see, ICN and adaptive multimedia streaming have several
   elements in common, such as the client-initiated pull approach, the
   content being dealt with in pieces as well as the support of
   efficient replication and distribution of content pieces within the
   network.  As ICN is a promising candidate for the Future Internet
   (FI) architecture, it is useful to investigate its suitability in
   combination with AMS systems and standards like MPEG-DASH as shown in
   [AdaptCCN][InterAdaptCCN], as well as the possibilities and benefits
   of intelligent network management to improve the performance of AMS
   in ICN as well as the resulting QoE at the client.

   One of the most promising aspects in this context is the possibility
   of ICN to consume content from different origin nodes as well as over
   different network links in parallel, which can be seen as an
   intrinsic error resilience feature w.r.t. the network.  This is a
   useful feature of ICN for adaptive multimedia streaming within mobile
   environments since most mobile devices are equipped with multiple
   network links.  Here, a focus of ICN management could be in the load
   balancing of such traffic between the available links.  This would
   increase the effective media throughput of the multimedia content,
   however, it could potentially lead to high variations of the
   resulting bandwidth which is available to the client.  As DASH is
   designed for environments with dynamic bandwidth conditions, they can
   be compensated in general.  However, more conservative adaptation
   algorithms may prevent too frequent switching between the content's
   bitrate representations as well as compensate short-term bandwidth
   drops caused by network link switches more smoothly.

2.3.  Content Management

   An ICN network aims to facilitate access to, and delivery of,
   information objects (content and services).  Content (in particular,
   video) access and delivery seems to be the dominant use case in
   traditional, host-based networks, so ICN networking is forced to
   adopt content delivery as a minimum requirement.  Indeed, virtually
   all ICN approaches so far target at least content delivery.

   From the perspective of a content owner or provider, an ICN network
   functions essentially as a content delivery network.  This creates a
   set of requirements for ICN.  First of all, end-users and content
   providers alike should be able to Read (consume) a content object
   available on the ICN network.  In addition, content providers need
   the ability to Create (publish), Update, and Delete content.



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   Finally, Accounting (logging) is necessary to support business models
   that typically require charging, analytics, and monitoring.

   The Read operation has received the lion's share in ICN research.
   This is expected as content access and delivery is at the heart of
   ICN.  Given a request for a named content object, the ICN network
   resolves that name to an object replica and proceeds with delivery to
   the end-user.  Of course, different ICN approaches employ different
   mechanisms to achieve the Read operation.  For example, name
   resolution can be done with a hierarchical system resembling DNS,
   with DHTs, or with flooding.  Similarly, content delivery can be done
   over normal best-effort paths from the origin server, over
   dynamically computed provisioned paths, or from caches close to the
   end-user.  Some approaches can even cater to mobile end-users and
   content hosts.  ICN should be able to handle frequent Reads as well
   as Read spikes (flash crowds).  In fact, it seems crucial for ICN's
   deployment chances to at least match the capabilities of incumbent
   content delivery systems.

   ICN research has not addressed Create as much as Read, but some
   effort has been expanded on mechanisms for publishing content.  Much
   of this effort has focused on content naming schemes that enable
   global uniqueness of names and hence allow global addressing of the
   content objects.  It has been difficult to balance human readability
   of names, efficiency in machine processing, and name aggregation
   (that can realistically enable request routing by name).  Although a
   fully automated mechanism for (human-readable) name assignment would
   be desirable, so far it seems that a manual process, similar to that
   of domain name registration in DNS, is necessary to allocate at least
   namespaces.  No other restrictions on naming have been seriously
   considered.  The consensus seems to be that with ICN anyone should be
   able to publish anything.  Content semantics are a higher layer
   issue.  This might be a prudent approach when building a transport
   layer technology, but it could undermine the potential of ICN
   deployment.  A content owner would not want copies of its content
   published on an ICN network under different names.  In any case, once
   a name has been assigned, the Create operation is mainly about
   creating an entry in the name resolution system.  This is obviously a
   security risk and furthermore, for highly distributed name resolution
   systems, it can suffer from considerable lag in availability.
   Fortunately, Create is a rare operation compared to Read.

   Update is an operation that seeks to alter an already created object.
   A content provider would want to modify the data or the metadata of a
   published object either to rectify publication errors or to augment
   the object.  It is debatable whether the provider should address the
   later simply by creating a new object.  Another use case for Update
   comes from the need to rebrand or alias an object when its rights



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   have been sold to another party.  Nevertheless, the Update operation
   has received minimal attention in ICN research.  The main problem is
   one of consistency: once an update has been committed, an ICN network
   with highly distributed name resolution and content delivery
   (caching) would host both the old and new versions of the updated
   content object for some time.  Security concerns for the Update and
   Create operations are similar.  Update is normally rarer than Create,
   but this will not be the case for collaborative media.

   Content providers may occasionally need to remove a published object.
   This is the goal of the Delete operation.  An object might be deleted
   when it was published by mistake, because it's no longer useful or
   relevant, or because it's illegal.  Consistency is a major challenge
   for the Delete operation as well.  The high degree of distribution in
   ICN can sustain a network state where some data or metadata replicas
   of an object have been deleted, while others persist.  On the other
   hand, this lag can be beneficial if deletion was initiated
   erroneously or maliciously.  Like with the Update operation, Delete
   has not been properly investigated in ICN research.  Deletes are
   typically less often than updates.

   From the point of view of content providers and end users, an ICN
   network resembles a content directory and repository, with Create,
   Read, Update, and Delete as typical operations.  As with any database
   system, the reliability of those operations (or transactions) depends
   on the properties of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and
   durability.  The challenge for ICN research is to build systems at a
   massive scale that employ those properties.

2.4.  Network Policies

2.4.1.  NetInf Management Considerations

   Early-phase work in NetInf management [NetInfSelfX] discussed a two-
   fold problem.  The first question that arises is whether it is
   possible by adopting a new set of network primitives and in-network
   storage to usher a new type of network management.  In other words,
   can network management become information-centric while handling
   often host-centric data?  The second question is whether an
   information-centric network is more suitable for self-management
   mechanisms than IP-based networks are.  In particular with respect to
   the later, [NetInfSelfX] introduced some design considerations for
   adding self-management mechanisms in NetInf.

   Of interest from this early work are two examples where network
   management can play a new role.  First, network management can get
   involved in decisions about caching and (re)distribution of content,
   and not only whether an (inter)face is on or off, or what traffic



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   limits should be enforced.  Moreover, network policies can be
   distributed securely in the same way as other content in the network,
   removing the need for centralized management, and enabling improved
   recovery procedures.  Second, network management can get involved in
   more intricate processes such as controlling multiaccess support,
   intermediating for content adaptation when deemed appropriate, and
   enabling richer tools for traffic engineering.

2.5.  Cache Management

   Caching is a hot topic research nowadays in ICN.  The challenges of
   caching in ICN are different than those of web caching, mainly
   because the former has to deal with high line rates and with a huge
   amount of content.  Some ICN works propose to cache content in all
   ICN routers traversed by the data packet, in an LCE (Leave Copy
   Everywhere) fashion as in [NDN].  Some studies, like [L4M-ICN], have
   shown that other cache decision policies, focused to reduce the cache
   redundancy, may increase the overall caching performance.  Some of
   these decision policies only use the local information available at
   the ICN routers, but others use the information available at other
   nodes to cache or not the incoming content.  This is known as
   explicit cache coordination decision, and there are several proposals
   around this concept [ICN-CACHING].  The idea behind the explicit
   coordination is to exchange topological information, individual
   cache's state and content popularity view among a set of ICN routers,
   in order to coordinate caching decisions.

   This way, a given ICN router may forward a request towards another
   router storing the requested content.  In this context, the routing
   protocol is affected by the cache's state of surrounding neighbours.
   For example, in [CATT] the authors propose to distinguish between the
   source(s) and routers' caches that hold a copy of that content: the
   former paths are globally advertised, while the latter are only
   advertised within the router's neighbourhood.  In all these cases,
   the use of a management framework may bring significant advantages,
   providing standard interfaces that allow the routers to dynamically
   manage their caches.

3.  Acknowledgements

   This document has benefited from comments and/or text provided by the
   following members of ICNRG:

4.  IANA Considerations

   This memo includes no request to IANA.





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5.  Security Considerations

   TBD

6.  Informative References

   [AdaptCCN]
              Lederer, S., Mueler, C., Rainer, B., Timmerer, C., and H.
              Hellwagner, "Adaptive Streaming over Content Centric
              Networks in Mobile Networks using Multiple Links",
              Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on
              Communication (ICC), Budapest, Hungary , June 2013.

   [CATT]     Eum, S., Nakauchi, K., Murata, M., Shoji, Y., and N.
              Nishinaga, "CATT: potential based routing with content
              caching for ICN", Workshop on Information-centric
              networking, pp 49-54 , 2012.

   [CCNx]     PARC, "CCNx Project", 2013, <http://www.ccnx.org>.

   [DONA]     Koponen, T. et al., "A Data-Oriented (and Beyond) Network
              Architecture", SIGCOMM, ACM , 2007.

   [GIPR2013]
              Sandivine, , "Global Internet Phenomena Report 1H 2013",
              Sandvine Intelligent Broadband Networks , 2013.

   [ICN-CACHING]
              Zhang, G., Li, Y., and T. Lin, "Caching in information
              centric networking: A survey", Computer Networks, vol. 57,
              no. 16, pp. 3128-3141, Nov , 2013.

   [ICN-Scenarios]
              Pentikousis, K., Ohlman, B., Corujo, D., and G. Boggia,
              "ICN Baseline Scenarios", draft-pentikousis-icn-scenarios
              (work in progress), February 2013.

   [InterAdaptCCN]
              Grandl, R., Su, K., and C. Westphal, "On the Interaction
              of Adaptive Video Streaming with Content-Centric
              Networking", Proceedings of the 20th Packet Video Workshop
              2013, San Jose, USA , December 2013.

   [L4M-ICN]  Chai, W., He, D., Psaras, I., and G. Pavlou, "Cache "less
              for more" in information-centric networks", Lecture Notes
              in Computer Science Vol. 7289, Springer, pp. 27-40 , 2012.





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   [MPEG-DASH]
              Sodagar, I., "The MPEG-DASH Standard for Multimedia
              Streaming Over the Internet", IEEE MultiMedia, IEEE,
              vol.18, no.4, pp.62-67 , 2011.

   [NDN-MGMT]
              Corujo, D., Vidal, I., Garcia-Reinoso, J., and R. Aguiar,
              "A named data networking flexible framework for management
              communications", Communications Magazine, IEEE , vol.50,
              no.12, pp.36-43 , Dec 2012.

   [NDN-R]    Zhang, L. et al., "Named Data Networking (NDN) Project",
              NDN Report ndn-0001, Tech Report, PARC , 2010,
              <http://www.named-data.net/techreport/TR001ndn-proj.pdf>.

   [NDN-VOIP]
              Jacobson, V., Smetters, D., Briggss, N., Plass, M.,
              Steward, P., and J. Thornton, "VoCCN: Voice Over Content-
              Centric Networks", ReARCH 2009, Rome , Dec 2009.

   [NDNFlexManager]
              UC3M and ITAV, "Framework for Flexible NDN Management",
              2013, <https://github.com/ndnflexmanager/framework>.

   [NDN]      Jacobson, V., Smetters, D., Thornton, J., Plass, M.,
              Briggss, N., and R. Braynard, "Networking Named Content",
              CoNEXT 2009, Rome , Dec 2009.

   [NetInfSelfX]
              Pentikousis, K. et al., "Self-Management for a Network of
              Information", IEEE ICC Workshops 2009 , June 2009.

   [NetInf]   Ahlgren, B. et al., "Design considerations for a network
              of information", CoNEXT, Re-Arch Workshop, ACM , 2008.

   [PURSUIT]  Fotiou, N. et al., "Developing Information Networking
              Further: From PSIRP to PURSUIT", BROADNETS, ICST , 2010.

   [RFC1157]  Case, J., Fedor, M., Schoffstall, M., and J. Davin,
              "Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)", STD 15, RFC
              1157, May 1990.

   [RFC3552]  Rescorla, E. and B. Korver, "Guidelines for Writing RFC
              Text on Security Considerations", BCP 72, RFC 3552, July
              2003.






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   [RFC5226]  Narten, T. and H. Alvestrand, "Guidelines for Writing an
              IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26, RFC 5226,
              May 2008.

   [RFC6733]  Fajardo, V., Arkko, J., Loughney, J., and G. Zorn,
              "Diameter Base Protocol", RFC 6733, October 2012.

Authors' Addresses

   Daniel Corujo
   Instituto de Telecomunicacoes
   Campus Universitario de Santiago
   Aveiro  P-3810-193 Aveiro
   Portugal

   Phone: +351 234 377 900
   Email: dcorujo@av.it.pt


   Kostas Pentikousis
   EICT GmbH
   Torgauer Strabe 12-15
   10829 Berlin
   Germany

   Email: k.pentikousis@eict.de


   Ivan Vidal
   UC3M
   Av de la Universidad, 30
   28911 Leganes, Madrid
   Spain

   Email: ividal@it.uc3m.es


   Jaime Garcia-Reinoso
   UC3M
   Av de la Universidad, 30
   28911 Leganes, Madrid
   Spain

   Email: jgr@it.uc3m.es







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   Stefan Lederer
   Alpen-Adria Universitat Klagenfurt
   Universitatsstrasse 65-67
   Klagenfurt
   Austria

   Email: stefan.lederer@itec.aau.at


   Spiros Spirou
   Intracom Telecom
   19.7 km Markopoulou Avenue
   Peania  19002
   Greece

   Email: spis@intracom.com



































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