A Survey of Green Information-Centric Networking: Research Issues and Challenges

To better cope with the Internet usage shift from host-centric end-to-end communication to receiver-driven content retrieval, innovative Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures have been proposed. With the explosive increase of global network traffic, the energy efficiency issue in ICN is a growing concern. A number of approaches have been proposed to address the energy efficiency issue in ICN. However, several significant research challenges remain to be addressed before its widespread deployment, including shutdown, slowdown, mobility and cloud computing. In this paper, we present a brief survey on some of the works that have already been done to achieve green ICN, and discuss some research issues and challenges. We identify several important aspects of green ICN: overview, energy efficiency metrics, network planning, enabling technologies, and challenges. Finally, we explore some broader perspectives for green ICN.