Managing data centers remains an important challenge despite the extensive research in this area. As the future prospective of networking is location-agnostic networks as in Information Centric Networking (ICN), some problems are solved but new challenges arise. When a data center runs over an ICN network, how can it discover failing replicas, monitor the load on running replicas, or decide when and where to instantiate new replicas? All these questions are hard to answer when the network is purely location-agnostic. In this paper we discuss the problem of pinpointing replicas and locations on ICN networks. We propose a draft of a protocol, Name-Centric Monitoring Protocol (NCMP), the use of which makes it possible to scan for replicas serving a named entity (content or service) and communicate with each one individually. A main application of NCMP is to monitor data centers and pull load information from service replicas.

Load balancing is a mechanism to distribute client requests among several service instances. It enables resource utilization, lowers response time, and increases user satisfaction. In Named-Data Networking (NDN) and NDN-like architectures, load balancing becomes crucial when dynamic services are present, where relying solely on forwarding strategies can overload certain service instances while others are underutilized especially with the limited benefit of on-path caching when it comes to services. To understand the challenges and opportunities of load balancing in NDN, we analyze conventional load balancing in IP networks, and three closely related fields in NDN: congestion control, forwarding strategies, and data center management. We identify three possible scenarios for load balancing in NDN: facade load balancer, controller for Interest queues, and router-based load balancing. These different solutions use different metrics to identify the load on replicas, have different compliance levels with NDN, and place the load balancing functionality in different network components. From our findings, we propose and implement a new lightweight router-based load balancing approach called the communicating vessels and experimentally show how it reduces service response time and senses server capabilities without probing.

Abstract. The future Internet architecture aims to reformulate the way services and content objects are requested in a location-independent manner. Information-Centric Networking is a new network paradigm, which tries to achieve this goal by making content objects identified and requested by names instead of addresses. In this paper, we extend the Information-Centric Networking architecture to support services to be requested and invoked by names. We present the NextServe framework, which is a service framework with a human-readable self-explanatory naming scheme. NextServe is inspired by the object-oriented programming paradigm and is applicable in realworld scenarios.

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