What are the Services of an Information-centric Network, and Who Provides Them?

Abstract—Various Information-centric Network (ICN) ser-vices have been proposed in the literature, such as content distribution, publish-subscribe, event notification, and search. Such services have traditionally been described as separate from one another, and little attention has been given to the issue of a common ICN architecture within which they all can interact efficiently. In this paper, we describe how information-centric services can interact within one archi-tectural framework to provide a rich ICN service offering related to Information Objects, such as content and data objects. We give examples of how the architecture can support various application domains, for example content distribution, machine-to-machine communication, and interactive and live streaming applications. We also propose the business role of an ICN Service Provider, which adds value by composing a service offering of a variety of ICN services. The contribution of the paper is to highlight the need for efficient interaction between multiple ICN services in order to provide an attractive and complete ICN service offering, to describe an architecture for such interaction, and to identify the business role of an ICN Service Provider. Keywords-Information-centric; architecture; service model. I