Information-centric networking (ICN) is a promising research field. Most network users wish to fetch data, but do not care about connecting to a specific host. By decoupling the data a user wants to access from the delivery method, ICN promises several natural benefits. The authors of this paper discuss whether ICN provides significant benefits, and if so, whether the same benefits can be achieved in a more incrementally deployable fashion within the scope of currently available mechanisms. They point out that quantitative benefits of ICN include lower response times and simplified traffic engineering, while qualitative benefits include the ability to name content and verify content integrity.

The authors present a reference design for an incrementally deployable ICN (idICN). This is “an application-layer ICN architecture that delivers most of the perceived benefits of ICN in a backwards-compatible fashion, without requiring any network layer support.” Caching and qualitative aspects of ICN are implemented at the edge of the network. The cornerstone of the proposal is the enhancement of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), providing support for proxy servers. Hosts can automatically discover and connect to a nearby HTTP server using zero configuration networking and the web proxy auto-discovery protocol (WPAD).

The main contribution of this paper is the increased understanding of different features of ICN and the design possibilities for incremental approaches. The ideas are clearly presented and the argumentation by the authors is technically very sound.