Exploiting OpenFlow resources towards a content-centric LAN

The efficient utilization of emerging new technologies for the sake of implementing attracting and novel network architectures is a major research challenge. As traditional addressing schemes seem to be rather inefficient to cope with emerging Internet technologies, research concerning Content Centric Networks (CCNs) has received a lot of attention by the research community. CCNs are designed to treat content as a primitive and therefore overcome the obstacles posed by traditional addressing schemes. Utilizing Software Defined Networking (SDN) approaches can lead to a realistic implementation of CCN scenarios. In this paper, we exploit the OpenFlow (OF) technology, an SDN enabler, in order to efficiently create and manage CCNs which are backward compatible with already existing networking infrastructure. We evaluate our scheme by using different load balancing policies, based on the actual network state at every observation interval. The process is completelly transparent to the end user, making our approach an easy to integrate solution for all existing networking topologies. Our solution is implemented and evaluated under a real life scenario, utilizing distributed testbed resources, consisting of the NITOS wireless testbed and PlanetLab-Europe (PLE). © 2013 IEEE