Information‐Centric Networking: The Case for an Energy‐Efficient Future Internet Architecture

Users are primarily interested in obtaining Content and do not care much about where they obtain the Content from. But, the Internet as it is currently designed is very host‐centric and places importance on the hosts establishing connection between them. Therefore, when a certain piece of data needs to be obtained, the Internet facilitates reliable connection between the two nodes, that is, the node interested in the data and the node with the data. If an established connection is broken, the infrastructure primarily focuses on re‐establishing the broken connection. In this chapter, we argue that energy optimization techniques applied on the current Internet infrastructure will not result in orders of magnitude increase in energy efficiency due to the limitations posed by the design. Furthermore, we argue for the need to consider the possibility of deploying future Internet architectures, namely Information‐Centric Networking. We provide elaborate message flows to further illustrate the characteristics of the proposed architecture and its influence on energy efficiency.