SoK: On Named Content and Inter-domain Routing

Inter-domain routing (IDR), in which autonomous systems (ASes) cooperate to exchange information so that packets can be forwarded to their intended destinations, is a crucial component of any global network service. IDR in today's Internet is already challenging because of the need to accommodate each AS's route selection policies. Policies are determined by business (i.e., generating revenue or increasing costs for the AS), performance, and reliability considerations. IDR for information-centric networking (ICN) services is further complicated by the scale and topology-independence of the data namespace. On the other hand, ICN approaches that offer built-in origin authenticity and integrity have potential to overcome some of the issues with the current Border Gateway Protocol-based legacy IDR system, which was originally deployed without security mechanisms. In this paper, we survey a set of representative IDR solutions for information-centric networking proposed in the literature. We describe key design aspects of such systems, and characterize the surveyed systems in terms of those aspects. We point out tradeoffs involved in minimizing network resources wasted on delivery of data that the application will consider bogus; this is important at the inter-domain level, where transit service involves compensation between ASes. Finally, we discuss the issue of trust, and identify potential research directions for IDR in the context of ICN.