ICN Publisher-Subscriber Models: Challenges and Group-based Communication

Accepted for Publication in IEEE Network Magazine.Information centric networking (ICN) architectures use pull-based communication with single interest response pairs. Content retrieval using this model is very efficient when the content already exists in the network. Subscription services for content that is being dynamically generated or will be generated in future, do not work well with pull based systems. In this work we investigate ICN as publisher-subscriber communication enabler, and present its challenges and limitation. Based on the observations, we propose a group-based subscription architecture, which enables not only a seamless publisher-subscriber model, but also authentication, access control, and group management features, without modifying ICN principles. Compared to traditional pull-based subscription, we are able to achieve lesser control overhead, with added security and privacy features. The performance analysis also shows that with semi-persistent interest, the memory requirements of the core nodes can be kept at minimal levels. We also identify interesting research challenges which can enable a rich ICN ecosystem for different types of services