Tcp/Icn: Carrying Tcp Over Content Centric And Named Data Networks

Today's Internet applications and protocols are not compatible with Information Centric Networking (ICN) protocols and there is no straightforward way of rapidly switching protocol architectures. Network operators incrementally deploying an ICN infrastructure will have to provide compatibility with existing TCP/IP applications and manage co-existence of IP and ICN networks. One approach to co-existence is to allow TCP and the applications using it to work transparently over an ICN substrate instead of over IP. This paper presents a TCP/ICN proxy capable of carrying TCP traffic between TCP/IP endpoints over ICN network. The main challenge for this approach to co-existence is transforming the TCP push model to the ICN pull model. We evaluated several alternative TCP/ICN proxy designs in a simulation environment. We chose the most promising of these designs and developed a proof-of-concept *nix implementation. Performance measurements of both simulation and real implementation demonstrate that with our proxy design TCP can traverse ICN networks without significant additional delay or loss of goodput.