Scalable control plane for intra-domain communication in software defined information centric networking

•An area-based hierarchical architecture (SAHA) for intra-domain communication in SD-ICN is proposed.•The SAHA supports interest matching and resource adaptation.•The detailed scalable resource awareness process and content-based communication process are designed.•The compatible solution for inter-domain communication is also discussed.

Recently there has been a new emerging trend in integrating Information Centric Networking (ICN) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) together in the future Internet research area. Software defined information centric networking (SD-ICN) may face more serious scalability problem in control plane compared with traditional SDN environment due to new features about in-network caching and content-based communication. In this paper, we propose a scalable area-based hierarchical architecture (SAHA) for intra-domain communication to address the control plane scalability problem in SD-ICN. The SAHA supports scalable awareness of network resources and content resources, as well as guarantees efficient interest matching and resource adaptation. Simulation experiments under OMNET++ show that the proposed SAHA can achieve outstanding scalability in resource awareness and content-based communication.