Arguments for an information-centric internetworking architecture

Abstract

The current Internet architecture focuses on communicating entities, largely leaving aside the information to be exchanged among them. However, trends in communication scenarios show that WHAT is being exchanged becoming more important than WHO are exchanging information. Van Jacobson describes this as moving from interconnecting machines to interconnecting information. Any change of this part of the Internet needs argumentation as to why it should be undertaken in the first place. In this position paper, we identify four key challenges, namely information-centrism of applications, supporting and exposing tussles, increasing accountability, and addressing attention scarcity, that we believe an information-centric internetworking architecture could address better and would make changing such crucial part worthwhile. We recognize, however, that a much larger and more systematic debate for such change is needed, underlined by factual evidence on the gain for such change.