A Survey of ICN Content Naming and In-Network Caching in 5G and Beyond Networks

Internet usability is expanded form just human-to-human interactions toward different communication types, while the communication itself is shifting from the host-centric model to the content-centric paradigm. The 5G and beyond networks promise not only to support such changes but also to provide massive data exchange and connectivity with high reliability. The next-generation networking technologies are the key enabled for 5G that aim at building a new ecosystem. One promising piece of this ecosystem is the information-centric network (ICN), which is a future network architecture that tends to tackle the current host-centric model issues. It natively supports several features, including abstraction content naming and transparent in-network content caching that contribute to improve network performance, reduce traffic, and improve the latency. In this article, we first provide a potential road map by introducing different next-generation active technologies to enable the big picture of 5G, including mobile-edge computing (MEC), software-defined networking (SDN), and network function virtualization (NFV). Then, we discuss the need for ICN and its coexistence within this ecosystem. Later, we present an in-depth review of the recent content naming schemes and a comprehensive review of in-network content caching solutions. We classify these solutions into different classes based on the used technologies and their working principle. Finally, we highlight some research challenges and propose promising directions for the research community.