On name-based group communication: Challenges, concepts, and transparent deployment

Human-centric naming will largely facilitate access and deployment of network services in a future Internet. Information-centric networking (ICN) introduces such vision of a name-oriented, secure, globally available publish-subscribe infrastructure. Current approaches concentrate on unicast-like pull mechanisms and thereby fall short of naming and automatically updating content at groups of receivers. In this paper, we adopt the information-centric paradigm, but argue that an inclusion of multicast will grant additional benefits to the network layer. Our contribution bridges the gap between requesting content by name and applying requests to a scalable distribution infrastructure in a many-to-many communication model. We introduce a group-oriented naming concept that integrates the various available group schemes, simplifies rendezvous processes, and introduces new use cases. We present an open-source prototype of this name-oriented multicast access implemented in the H∀Mcast middleware.