Performance comparison and optimization of ICN prototypes

Information Centric Networking paradigm is now a solid proposal to replace and update the original Internet design. While the research community is still working on technical improvement, the technology has reached a stage that allows the design, testing and deployment of ICN specific applications. To this goal, key is the role of platforms to setup and instrument testbeds that allow researcher to evaluate their applications in a real setup, and not only using simulations or analytically. There are few existing ICN prototypes that would allow experimenter to work in this direction. Their performance is clearly vital, so that they do not create artificial bottlenecks that would affect any testing. Unfortunately however, existing solutions have been designed to demonstrate the feasibility of the ICN solution, thus lacking of optimization and scalability required to run performance thorough evaluation. In this paper we address this lack. First, we offer a performance comparison between available ICN prototypes. Next, we propose improvements to increase scalability, and remove bottlenecks that hamper current software-based prototypes.