ICN Baseline Scenarios and Evaluation Methodology

This document aims at establishing a common understanding about the evaluation of different information-centric networking (ICN) approaches so that they can be tested and compared against each other while showcasing their own advantages. Towards this end, we review the ICN literature and document scenarios which have been considered in previous performance evaluation studies. We discuss a variety of aspects that an ICN solution can address. This includes general aspects, such as, network efficiency, reduced complexity, increased scalability and reliability, mobility support, multicast and caching performance, real-time communication efficacy, energy consumption frugality, and disruption and delay tolerance. We detail ICN- specific aspects as well, such as information security and trust, persistence, availability, provenance, and location independence. We then survey the evaluation tools currently available to researchers in this area and provide suggestions regarding methodology and metrics. Finally, this document sheds some light on the impact of ICN on network security.