Session Date/Time: 17 Mar 2025 10:00

icnrg Meeting Minutes

Summary

The ICNRG meeting in Bangkok covered a range of topics including offline content access using NDN, updates on FLIC and content chunking/versioning drafts, reflexive forwarding, and the Distributed Microservice Architecture (DMSA) initiative. Key discussions revolved around challenges and solutions for leveraging ICN in diverse scenarios, including resource-constrained environments and complex service architectures.

Key Discussion Points

Offline Content Access with NDN over D2D: A presentation explored using NDN over device-to-device (D2D) communication to provide offline content access in areas with limited or expensive internet connectivity. Challenges include opportunistic connectivity, pushing mechanisms, D2D discovery, and resource limitations. The proposed architecture included a content mediator and D2D communication manager.
FLIC Updates: Mark presented updates on the FLIC draft, highlighting reorganization for readability, RSA key wrapping implementation, IANA considerations, and security considerations. The discussion clarified that FLIC is an acyclic graph, not a tree, which is important for data deduplication. Experimental results with deduplication were shared, showing significant storage savings.
Content Chunking and Versioning: Updates on the content chunking draft included using preamble chunks for fixed-size payloads, optional end chunk number and chunk size specifications. The versioning draft introduced a version request mechanism to discover the most current version of content, with two possible response formats: concise version number or a CCNA link.
Reflexive Forwarding: Dave gave an update on the reflexive forwarding draft, which aims to enable multi-way handshakes in ICN for applications like RPC, IoT sensor data, and peer state synchronization. The discussion focused on how to encode in the trigger interest what the producer is supposed to request in the other direction. There was a push for wider review and more implementations of the draft.
Distributed Microservice Architecture (DMSA): Ajun Wang presented the DMSA initiative, aimed at addressing challenges with current microservice architectures (e.g., complexity, performance overhead, centralized control). The goal is to build a service-oriented network that leverages existing ICN technologies. Questions included container deployment assumptions, potential for new microservice systems, and incorporating distributed AI systems.

Decisions and Action Items

FLIC Draft Last Call: Mark will make a last call request for the FLIC draft on the mailing list after the meeting/week.
Versioning Draft Update: Mark will update the versioning draft on the Datatracker by the end of the week to align with the presentation.
Reflexive Forwarding Review: The group urged a wider review of the reflexive forwarding draft. People who are interested in implementation or have views about the design should do a code review.
DMSA Interaction: The ICNRG will observe the progress of the DMSA initiative and explore potential collaboration opportunities. Anjune should follow up on shortcomings of ICN to support microservices.

Next Steps

Continue development and refinement of FLIC, chunking, and versioning drafts based on feedback and implementation experience.
Encourage wider review and implementation of the reflexive forwarding draft.
Monitor the progress of the DMSA initiative and identify potential areas for ICNRG collaboration.