Network economics of SDN-based infrastructures: Can we unlock value through ICN multicast?

Software-defined networking (SDN) is enabling radically easier deployment of new routing infrastructures in enterprise and operator networks. However, it is not clear how to best exploit this flexibility, when also considering the migration costs. In this paper, we use tools from network economics to study a recent proposal of using information-centric networking (ICN) principles on an SDN infrastructure for improving the delivery of Internet Protocol (IP) services. The key value proposition of this IP-over-ICN approach is to use the native and lightweight multicast service delivery enabled by the ICN technology to reduce network load by removing redundant data. Our analysis shows that for services where IP multicast delivery is technically feasible, IP-over-ICN deployments are economically sensible if only few users will access the given service simultaneously. However, for services where native IP multicast is not a technically feasible option, such as for dynamically generated or personalized content, IP-over-ICN significantly outperforms IP.