Information resilience: Source recovery in an information-centric network

Recent years have witnessed explosive growth in traffic demands combined with evolving content characteristics and dissemination patterns. This growth has resulted in an increasing demand for information identification as well as information-based communication functions that can meet this evolution. Consequently, information-centric networking envisions a shift in the future Internet communication paradigm from relying on the notion of an end node toward making information itself the primary object. This is realized by adopting information as the primary identifier of a user's demand. With this new concept in networking, new (information- focused) solutions can be developed to conventional problems found in IP networks, such as resilient content delivery. In this article we introduce a novel resiliency solution that goes beyond the scope of path recovery to tackle source failure scenarios in order to achieve the more general form of information resilience. We show that by utilizing the knowledge of information, offered by a publish/subscribe information-centric networking model, multiple publishers of a single information item can be natively identified, thereby allowing for recovery of the delivery process using alternative publishers should a publisher fail. © 1986-2012 IEEE