ICN-2015 Conference Program
Join us for the ICN-2015 Conference in San Francisco from Sep. 30 to Oct. 2.
ACM ICN is an annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) on information-centric networking.
In a nutshell, this year's conference includes
- 1 keynote given by Van Jacobson
- 19 full papers presented in single track format
- 8 posters
- 10 demos
- 2 full-day tutorials
- 1 industrial panel
Conference details:
http://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2015/
Registration details:
http://www.regonline.com/icn2015
Keynote:
- Van Jacobson, Internet pioneer and core architect of Named Data
Networking (NDN), will talk about "Improving the Internet with ICN".
Tutorials:
- CCN: Practical CCNx - Protocol and Code
- NDN: Security & Synchronization in Named Data Networking (NDN)
Panel:
- Next Steps for ICN: Research, Applications, Deployment and Economics
Topics of papers, posters, and demos include:
- Architecture design and evaluation
- Comparison of ICN architecture proposals
- Limits and limitations of ICN architectures
- ICN evaluation methodology and metrics
- Evaluation of ICN benefits
- Analysis of scalability issues in ICN
- ICN enabled applications
- Routing in ICN networks
- Mobility support
- Trust management
- Access control mechanisms
- ICN economics and business models
- Tools and experimentation facilities
- Measurement methodologies
- Experience from implementations and experiments
- Specific scenarios and implementation approaches
- Feasibility studies for high speed networking
- Privacy
- ICN Deployment
- ICN APIs
Check out the program.
Privacy, Performance, Protocols: ICN Researchers meet in Prague
The IRTF Information-Centric Networking Research Group (ICNRG) had another ICN research fest with two meetings this week in Prague where IETF-93 is taking place.
ICN is an approach to evolve the Internet infrastructure to directly support information distribution by introducing uniquely named data as a core Internet principle. Data becomes independent from location, application, storage, and means of transportation, enabling in-network caching and replication. This enables the design of more robust, secure and better performing networked systems.
This week, more than 100 researchers got together to discuss recent advances in protocol development, performance optimizations, user privacy and new use cases.
One of the protocols that are developed in ICNRG is CCNx, a network protocol that provides requests (Interests) for named data and Content Object responses. The protocol semantics are specified in draft-irtf-icnrg-ccnxsemantics, and the protocol format is specified in draft-irtf-icnrg-ccnxmessages. The ICN community is currently discussing several extensions to the protocol, including support for "manifest" objects, which would facilitate the distribution of larger, chunked objects and add additional performance and flexibility to ICN systems.
Another highlight of the meeting was a presentation by Iannis Psaras from UCL on Solving the Congestion Problem using ICNPrinciples, an approach that is using Resource Pooling as a tool to manage uncertainty in congestion management.
Vasilis Sourlas (UCL) presented Information Resilience through User-Assisted Caching in Disruptive Content-Centric Networks. The corresponding paper won the IFIP 2015 best paper award and describes work from the GreenICN project. The approach relies on a modified NDN router design that features a “Satisfied Interest Table” (SIT) that enables user-assisted caching.
Bengt Ahlgren (SICS) presented on the Applicability and Tradeoffs of ICN for Efficient IoT (draft-lindgren-icnrg-efficientiot). This document outlines the tradeoffs involved in utilizing Information Centric Networking (ICN) for the Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. It describes the contexts and applications where the IoT would benefit from ICN, and where a host-centric approach would be better. The requirements imposed by the heterogeneous nature of IoT networks are discussed (e.g., in terms of connectivity, power availability, computational and storage capacity). Design choices are then proposed for an IoT architecture to handle these requirements, while providing efficiency and scalability. An objective is to not require any IoT specific changes of the ICN architecture per se, but we do indicate some potential modifications of ICN that would improve efficiency and scalability for IoT and other applications.
Dirk Trossen (Inter Digital) presented IPoverICN – the Better IP?, a presentation of the EU-H2020 POINT project that is developing an IP over ICN system. The hypothesis of this project is that IPoverICN has the potential to run IP services better than in standard IP networks.
Mark Stapp (Cisco) presented on Private Communication in ICN. This presentation asks the question whether ICN needs better privacy protection to achieve parity with IP for user privacy in the presence of ubiquitous encryption. The discussion initiated an intensive discussion on privacy requirements for ICN that will continue in upcoming meetings.
Jan Seedorf (NEC) presented on Using ICN in Disaster Scenarios (draft-seedorf-icn-disaster/). This is a presentation of the GreenICN project and summarized some research challenges for coping with natural or human-generated, large-scale disasters. Further, the document discusses potential directions for applying Information Centric Networking (ICN) to address these challenges.
All presentations and detailed notes can be found at the ICNRG Wiki.
This summer will host a series of additional ICN events:
Open Source Carrier Networking
Open Source Software development models are changing the way the telco industry is creating products and systems. This presentation at ONS-2015 discusses how innovation, agile development and Open Source Software are linked together.It presents experience with transforming telco vendor development from closed to open source and provides an outlook of future activities in the NFV space.
Talk Info (Presentation available on request)
OPNFV Arno Released

The OPNFV project has released its first major software release "Arno".
OPNFV is a carrier-grade,integrated, open source platform to accelerate the introduction of new Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) products and services.
Arno is a developer-focused release that provides an initial build of the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) components of ETSI NFV architecture.
Key capabilities of OPNFV Arno:
- Availability of baseline platform: Arno enables continuous integration, automated deployment and testing of components from upstream projects such as Ceph, KVM, OpenDaylight, OpenStack and Open vSwitch. It allows developers and users to automatically install and explore the platform.
- Ability to deploy and test various VNFs: End users and developers can deploy their own or third party VNFs on Arno to test its functionality and performance in various traffic scenarios and use cases.
- Availability of test infrastructure in community-hosted labs: Agile testing plays a crucial role in the OPNFV platform. With Arno, the project is unveiling a community test labs infrastructure where users can test the platform in different environments and on different hardware. This test labs infrastructure enables the platform to be exercised in different NFV scenarios to ensure that the various open source components come together to meet vendor and end user needs.
- Allows automatic continuous integration of specific components: As upstream projects are developed independently they require testing of various OPNFV use cases to ensure seamless integration and interworking within the platform. OPNFV’s automated toolchain allows continuous automatic builds and verification.
Links
- https://www.opnfv.org/arno
- Press Release: OPNFV Delivers Open Source Software to Enable Deployment of Network Functions Virtualization Solutions
The Next Step of OpenStack Evolution for NFV Deployments
Chris Wright and I presented on "The Next Step of OpenStack Evolutionfor NFV Deployments" at last week's OpenStack Summit in Vancouver.
Presentation at OpenStack Summit
NFV is now a well-known concept and in an early deployment stage, leveraging and adapting OpenStack and other Open Source Software systems. In the OPNFV project, a large group of industry peers is building a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform for the NFV community. The telco industry has successfully adopted Open Source Software for carrier-grade deployments. It is now time for taking the next steps and to extend the colloaboration with upstream projects -- by opening up previously proprietary developments, by contributing code and other artifacts in order to create a ecosystem of NFV platforms, applications, and management/orchestration systems.
This presentation shares some insights on how Red Hat and NEC are working together to foster collaboration in the NFV ecosystem by actively working with OpenStack and other upstream projects.
NEC has pioneered the adoption of Linux, KVM, Open vSwitch, and OpenStack for their mobile network core product line (virtualized EPC)
and has gained significant experience through development work and deployments. NEC's extensions for high efficiency and high
availability have led to contributions of new features to OpenStack, such as DPDK vSwitch control and CPU allocation features. For NEC, it is very important to have those features integrated into the mainstream code base for building reliable infrastructure systems.
Red Hat, one of main contributors to OpenStack, leads the development of those functions to meet NFV requirements in OpenStack, making critical and demanding applications run of top of open platforms. The presentation explains how NEC and Red Hat are integrating and optimizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and NFV, along with contributions to open source communities, including OpenStack and Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV).
Scalable Content Exchange in Challenged ICNs
I presented GreenICN work on Scalable Content Exchange in Challenged ICNs at CCNxCon-2015 this week.
Download: ccnxcon2015-kutscher.pdf
Abstract:
The principles of InformationCentric Networking (ICN), accessing data objects by name (not by location address), securing data objects (not connections), innetwork caching (for sharing, repair, rate adaptation) make ICN attractive for a wide range of application scenarios beyond traditional data center or telco access network scenarios. In fact, one of the first instantiation of ICN had been developed based on DelayTolerant Networking (DTN) technologies.
Currently, ICN/DTN is considered a promising approach for enabling/enhancing communication in disaster scenarios. In such scenarios, socalled ICN data mules (that carry and disseminate data times) may move randomly, and each time data mules encounter one another exchange data items. We envision that in such a scenario where there is no connectivity, data mules (e.g. vehicles or drones) can move around randomly. So these mobile routers interact with end users, working base stations and other data mules to fetch and deliver the data and queries. Thus, we do not consider adhoc networks where you can build a path to the destination reactively or proactively, rather a DTN like scenario.
Consider a large scale disaster scenario like the earthquake in Japan in 2011 , where people in different parts of the city are stranded without the internet connectivity. But there are some zones, where base stations are still working and providing connectivity. Essentially, the scenario is such that ICN data mule move randomly across a geographic area, and when meeting endusers receive interests from them and also forward corresponding data items to endusers (if present in the content store / cache of the data mule). At the same time, when data mules encounter each other, they forward to each other certain enduser interest and/or data items (according to a predefined rule set and algorithm), such that interests and data items can be forwarded in a hopbyhop DTN fashion. One research problem in such a scenario is how to optimize such data exchanges among data mules for optimal data dissemination (e.g. optimizing how many desired messages reach their recipients within a given timeframe with a given forwarding strategy, assuming that data mules only have limited time at each encounter to exchange
messages).
ICN Researchers Meet in Cambridge, MA

The ICN Research Group of the IRTF has met for a two day meeting in Cambridge, MA on January 13/14. More than 30 researchers from the US, Europe, China, and Japan gathered to discuss hot research topics in ICN such as:
- Native ICN-based video streaming
- Security (authenticated denial in ICN)
- IoT and ICN
- Hop-by-hop control messages in CCN
- Named Function Networking
In addition, different groups presented updates on their current implementations and their design decisions for packet formats and ICN protocols. For CCN-based protocols further steps towards a common format have been made.
The next meeting (planned for the week of March 23rd in Dallas, at IETF-92) will continue the packet format discussion and progress new topics such as Named Function Networking.
Call for Papers: 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2015)

The Call for Papers for the 2nd ACM Conference on ICN is out:
Call for Papers
** 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2015) **
Sponsored by ACM and ACM SIGCOMM
http://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2015
San Francisco, USA, September 30 - October 2, 2015
Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new network architecture intended to provide access to information without requiring an explicit binding of that information to a particular location. By directly addressing information, ICN supports mobile users and mobile networked devices, offers a higher-level communication service to applications, and promotes authentication and efficiency in the transmission and dissemination of information. Over the last few years, a global research and development community has grown around the idea of ICN.
ACM ICN 2015 is the second edition of the ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking, which follows a series of workshops on ICN held in conjunction with the ACM Sigcomm conference. ACM ICN 2015 is the premier international forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in information centric networking. ACM ICN 2015 will be a single-track conference featuring paper and poster presentations, panel discussions, and demonstrations.
The Technical Program Committee of ACM ICN 2015 invites high-quality submissions describing unpublished research results in all aspects of ICN, with particular emphasis on contributions to architectural designs and reproducible experimental evaluations. Papers submitted for consideration should not have been already published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere during the consideration period.
Specifically, authors are required to adhere to the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism
(http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism_policy) and the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions (http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/sim_submissions).
Topics of interest include:
* Architecture design and evaluation
* Comparison of different ICN architectures
* Interoperability across ICN architectures
* ICN evaluation methodology and metrics
* Analysis of scalability issues in ICN
* ICN enabled applications
* Routing in ICN
* Transport issues in ICN
* Caching
* Mobility support
* Trust management and access control
* Management in ICN
* ICN economics and business models
* Tools, experimentation facilities, and measurement methodology for ICN
* Experience from implementation
* Feasibility studies of ICN for high speed networking
* Privacy
* ICN Deployment
* ICN APIs
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Submission Instructions
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Submitted papers can be up to 10 pages in length following the SIGCOMM format. All submissions must be in English and in PDF format. Submissions that do not comply with these instructions will be rejected without review.
Papers must be submitted electronically through the ICN 2015 submission site.
Submissions will be reviewed and evaluated on the basis of originality, importance of contribution, soundness, evaluation, quality of presentation and appropriate comparison to related work. The program committee as a whole will make final decisions about which submissions to accept for presentation at the conference. The program committee may propose that authors present their work with a poster accompanied by a 2-page extended abstract. ACM ICN 2015 also invites proposals for demos, tutorials and panel sessions.
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Important Dates
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Full Paper Submission: May 22, 2015
Acceptance Notification: July 20, 2015
Camera Ready Due: Aug. 15, 2015
Conference: September 30 - October 2, 2015
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Conference General Chairs
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- Nacho (Ignacio) Solis (PARC, USA)
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Technical Program Committee Chairs
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- Antonio Carzaniga (USI, Switzerland)
- K. K. Ramakrishnan (UC Riverside, USA)
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Technical Program Committee Members
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- Mayutan Arumaithurai (University of Goettingen, Germany)
- Giuseppe Bianchi (University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy)
- Nicola Blefari-Melazzi (University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy)
- Jeff Burke (UCLA, USA)
- Kenneth Calvert (University of Kentuky, USA)
- Giovanna Carofiglio (Cisco)
- Patrick Crowley (Washington University, USA)
- Christian Esteve Rothenberg (UNICAMP, Brazil)
- JJ Garcia-Luna-Aceves (University of California Santa Cruz, USA)
- Toru Hasegawa (Osaka University, Japan)
- Jussi Kangasharju (University of Helsinki, Finland)
- Satyajayant Misra (New Mexico State University, USA)
- Vishal Misra (Columbia University, USA)
- Luca Muscariello (Orange Labs, France)
- Kiran Nagaraja (Ericsson)
- Dave Oran (Cisco, USA)
- Jörg Ott (Aalto University, Finland)
- Christos Papadopoulos (Colorado State University, USA)
- Craig Partridge (BBN, USA)
- Diego Perino (Alcatel Lucent, France)
- George Polyzos (AUEB, Greece)
- Yiannis Psaras (UCL, UK)
- Dipankar Raychaudhuri (Rutgers University, USA)
- Jim Roberts (IRT SystemX, France)
- Dario Rossi (Telecom ParisTech, France)
- Thomas Schmidt (HAW Hamburg, Germany)
- Jan Seedorf (NEC Labs Europe)
- Nacho (Ignacio) Solis (PARC, USA)
- Karen Sollins (MIT, USA)
- Christian Tschudin (Uni Basel, Switzerland)
- Arun Venkataramani (UMass, USA)
- Matthias Wählisch (FU Berlin, Germany)
- Roy Yates (Rutgers University, USA)
- Lixia Zhang (UCLA, USA)
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More Details
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Please see http://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2015
Open Standards, Open Source, Open Loop
Dave Ward (Chief Architect at Cisco) gave an interesting lunch talk on the relationship between Open Standards and Open Source Software at IETF-91 today. Technologies such as OpenFlow and NFV are increasingly being advanced through Open Source Software projects that develop both individual components as well as larger systems. The developed artifacts are sometimes being referred to as de-facto standards.
Dave gave some perspectives on how Open Source Software can help to speed up collaborative technology development and related this to standards work in the IETF and other bodies. Dave emphasized the importance of Open Standards for the development of Internet technologies but he pointed out that Open Standards can leverage Open Source to speed up specification development and to validate architecture and protocol specifications.
The talk suggested embracing Open Source Software development for standards work in the IETF, pointing at new working models and skill sets that were required for that.
Obviously, the IETF has always had a focus on running code for validating specification and several recent efforts have been leveraging OSS succesfully -- for example CORE, DTN and many others. Still, there was agreement that there is room for extending and potentially institutionalizing this.
The Beauty of ICN in IoT
One of the papers recenty presented at ICN-2014 described an interesting IoT implementation and corresponding experiment with CCN-Lite on the RIOT platform.
Previously, ICN has been perceived as providing conceptual benefits such as
- simplified, natural APIs to developers;
- increased robustness through caching;
- facilitating data fusion through hop-by-hop replication;
- reduced network stack layering; and
- inherent auto-configuration.
The authors describe their implementation of CCN-Lite on RIOT and their approach to realize IoT communication in a 60 node testbed. The idea is to apply Reactive Optimistic Name-based Routing (RONR), i.e., an ICN name-based forwarding approach to send requests for named information in an IoT network using a hybrid flooding/unicast approach.
Some results of their comparison:
- 70% less ROM, 80% less RAM usage by the stack implementation (compared to a RPL/6lowpan implementation);
- 50% reduction of transmitted packets thanks to RONR and ICN caching.
Some pointers for further reading:
- Emmanuel Baccelli, Christian Mehlis, Oliver Hahm, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch; Information Centric Networking in the IoT: Experiments with NDN in the Wild; ACM ICN-2014; September 2014; [paper], [presentation]
- CCN-Lite
- RIOT -- the friendly OS for the IoT
- ACM SIGCOMM ICN-2014


