NDNe: Enhancing Named Data Networking to Support Cloudification at the Edge

The technological advances in mobile devices are pushing cloud computing to the network edge, where services like data storage and processing can be offered by mobile devices locally with improved quality. In this letter, we identify Named Data Networking (NDN) as a key enabler to support “by design” the peculiarities of decentralized edge clouds at the network layer. We extend NDN beyond its original scope of content retrieval facilitator, by letting names to address, not only “contents”, but also “cloud services” and enhancing the semantics of NDN primitives to efficiently and reliably support both the provider discovery and the service provisioning phases. An early evaluation is performed to showcase the benefits of the proposal, also when compared to a traditional TCP/IP-based approach.