Push applications and dynamic content generation over content-centric networking

Content-Centric Networking (CCN) represents an established candidate for the future Internet, proposing a routing architecture designed to elevate content to first class entity. Starting from the fact that the network usage has dramatically evolved towards content retrieval, CCN relies on an on-demand pull based mechanism to transfer data from the different sources to the heterogeneous consumers. This paradigm enhances the network in a number of ways, ranging from the newly introduced in-network caching capabilities to the benefits provided by the symmetric data routing adopted by CCN. In this renewed network scenario, we place our attention to those applications that do not perfectly fit the pull paradigm, stating that they need to be supported as well and proposing an effective way to achieve scalability on large scale push applications. We provide the following contributions: (i) we identify the functions that a data-centric architecture should support; (ii) propose and compare our solution with the state of the art framework designed for the specific problem of pushing data to content requesters; and (iii) evaluate their performance in terms of traffic generated and scalability achieved by simulating a real Internet Service Provider (ISP) topology and the realistic workload of a generic social network application. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.