Hybrid Information-Centric Networking

Hybrid Information-Centric Networking (hICN) is a network architecture that makes use of IPv6 or IPv4 to implement location-independent communications. It is largely inspired by the pioneer work of Van Jacobson on Content-Centric Networking (RFC 8569, RFC 8609) that is a clean-slate architecture. hICN is based on the Internet protocol and easyier to deploy in today networks and applications. hICN brings many-to-many communications, multi-homing, multi-path, multi-source, group communications to the Internet protocol. The current code implements also transport protocols, with a socket API, for real-time and capacity seeking applications. A scalable stack is available based on VPP and a client stack is provided to support mobile and desktop operating systems.

A detailed description of the architecture is described in the paper

Giovanna Carofiglio, Luca Muscariello, Jordan Augé, Michele Papalini, Mauro Sardara, and Alberto Compagno. 2019. Enabling ICN in the Internet Protocol: Analysis and Evaluation of the Hybrid-ICN Architecture. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN ‘19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 55–66. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3357150.3357394

The project wiki page is full of resources https://wiki.fd.io/view/HICN

Getting started

Core library

The VPP Plugin

The Portable Forwarder

Network Control and Management