Revolutionizing the inter-domain business model by information-centric thinking

It has been widely agreed that the architecture of the Internet is ossified. Many advanced technologies were proposed to deal with the shortcomings of the Internet, such as Quality of Service (QoS), IP multicast, and BGP multipath, but they have not been deployed widely in the Internet. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has attracted many interests in the research community. The key insight of ICN is that the usage of the Internet has dramatically changed from connecting nodes to accessing information. By the inspiration of ICN thinking, we argue that it is not the ossification of the IP architecture which matters, but the ossification of the business model between ISPs. In this paper, we propose a Supply Chain Management (SCM) based business model to regulate the business relationships between ISPs. The payment flow along Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is changed from the conventional bottom up mode to a chain like mode, very similar to the payment flow of SCM. Simulation results show that the average Autonomous System (AS) hops can be reduced by 47% at most. The hit ratio of replicated contents can be improved by 28% at most, and the profit change of various ASes is almost balanced.