A packet rewriting core for Information Centric Networking

Although very similar, Information Centric Networking implementations like CCNx or NDN have not converged (yet). Moreover, high-level extensions like named functions and low-level considerations for IoT or logical link control will lead to even more variety in formats and experiments, also including slight (and not well-documented) changes of the ICN protocols' behavior. Based on our experience with the multi-protocol implementation CCN-lite, we have developed a domains-specific intermediate language ICCL (Information Centric Core Language). Initially, the purpose of ICCL was to document the common as well as diverging aspects of the various approaches and to provide a run-time which can directly execute an ICCL program. But as it turned out, ICCL became a tool beyond modeling the behavior of ICN forwarders. For example, by including appropriate primitives to access local data sources, one can now seamlessly include in an ICCL program the access to data repositories or serve on-demand data from sensors. This enables easy programmability of network functionality and contributes to “do-it-yourself” networking. We discuss the benefit of this fusion for the development of ICN functionality and report on performance measurements for our prototype system.