Towards a monitoring protocol over information-centric networks

Abstract

Managing data centers remains an important challenge despite the extensive research in this area. As the future prospective of networking is location-agnostic networks as in Information Centric Networking (ICN), some problems are solved but new challenges arise. When a data center runs over an ICN network, how can it discover failing replicas, monitor the load on running replicas, or decide when and where to instantiate new replicas? All these questions are hard to answer when the network is purely location-agnostic. In this paper we discuss the problem of pinpointing replicas and locations on ICN networks. We propose a draft of a protocol, Name-Centric Monitoring Protocol (NCMP), the use of which makes it possible to scan for replicas serving a named entity (content or service) and communicate with each one individually. A main application of NCMP is to monitor data centers and pull load information from service replicas.