Traffic Engineering in Information-Centric Networking: Opportunities, Solutions and Challenges

ICN is a novel communication paradigm that assigns names to content chunks (instead of IP addresses to hosts). ICN offers inherent features such as content metadata and in-network caching, which make it possible to reduce content transmission cost and retrieval latency and to improve the users' QoE. To achieve these goals, TE techniques need to be leveraged to deal with bursty and unevenly distributed Internet traffic demand. In this article, we explore new TE opportunities in ICN based on information-centric features and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art TE solutions that use these features.