Hybrid ICN Mapping and Interoperability Framework for Legacy Applications

Research topics Information-centric Networks (ICN) | Peer-to-Peer Networks (P2P) | Protocol Conversion 

Description

In this project we are tackling two very important and related problems. The first problem is the lack of support for legacy applications in hybrid information-centric networks (hICN). Although the hICN socket API is useful when writing new consumer/producer applications from scratch, porting existing legacy Internet Protocal (IP) client/server applications to hICN is challenging given that the legacy socket API calls are semantically different from hICN socket API ones. The second problem is the lack of interoperability between hICN and emerging name-based overlay networks such as the Interplanetary File System (IPFS).

In order to address the first problem, we will research and design a mapping library to support legacy name-based application protocols over hICN. In order to address the second problem, we will research and design a mapping gateway which will enable interoperability between IPFS and hICN networks; that is, endpoints of hICN will be able to retrieve IPFS content and vice versa. We aim to build a complete prototype of the mapping library and gateway respectively, with both solutions tested with the available codebase of Hybrid ICN.