The Internet has grown well beyond what it was originally designed for, with critical functions of societies, companies and individuals increasing becoming dependent on it. To facilitate new applications, including but not limited to IPTV, on a global scale, new technologies are needed to cope with the challenges of capacity, robustness and security.
Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is seen as one possible solution to many of the problems of the current Internet. Earlier work, including that performed in the FP7 PURSUIT project, strongly indicates that IP-based applications can run ‘better’ on an IP-over-ICN network architecture than on existing IP-centric networks. Despite the evidence, this statement can only be treated as a hypothesis, when considering a fully developed business value chain. Consequently, a need exists for innovation-driven research and proof-of-concept work to prove this hypothesis in commercially realistic settings.
The main goal of the POINT project is to develop technology, innovations, and business value chains for commercially viable IP-over-ICN networking. This is necessary in order to encourage and facilitate stakeholders transitioning to the IP-over-ICN networking paradigm. Without such proof, no such transition can take place, as purely academic work is not convincing enough for the stakeholders to invest in an emerging networking technology.
The POINT project is innovating on IP-over-ICN solutions, building on prior academic work with the following objectives: 1) definition of key performance indicators (KPIs) which define what is meant with ‘better’, 2) definition of a network architecture and a platform based on it, 3) design and implementation of abstractions to enable standard Internet applications to run on our ICN-based platform, 4) design and implementation of resource coordination mechanisms, 5) creation of a POINT prototype platform to be tested against the KPIs in both testbed and emulation environments as well as 6) in an operational trial, 7) evaluation of the commercial viability of an IP-over-ICN alternative to IP networks, and 8) establishing POINT as a key driver in the ICN community.
Over its three-year duration, the project managed to progress in its key technical contributions from Technology Readiness Level 2 (“technology concept formulated”) to Technology Readiness Level 7 (“system prototype demonstration in operational environment”). Since starting from the concept of IP over ICN, within three years, it managed to trial novel services to users, in the form of an AR game in the BIO environment, and support the commercially available IPTV and HLS services offered by PrimeTel in an open trial in actual user homes in Cyprus.
