ECCN: Orchestration of Edge-Centric Computing and Content-Centric Networking in the 5G Radio Access Network

Edge-centric computing (ECC) and content- centric networking (CCN) will be the most important technologies in future 5G networks. However, due to different architectures and protocols, it is still a challenge to fuse ECC and CCN together and provide manageable and flexible services. In this article, we present ECCN, an orchestrating scheme that integrates ECC and CCN into a hierarchical structure with software defined networking (SDN). We introduce the SDN technology into the hierarchical structure to decouple data and control planes of ECC and CCN, and then design an SDN protocol to control the data forwarding. We also implement two demonstration applications in our testbed to evaluate the ECCN scheme. The experimental results from the testbed applications, and extensive simulations show ECCN outperforms original structures.