  While research on Information-Centric Networking (ICN) flourishes, its
adoption seems to be an elusive goal. In this paper we propose Edge-ICN: a
novel approach for deploying ICN in a single large network, such as the network
of an Internet Service Provider. Although Edge-ICN requires nothing beyond an
SDN-based network supporting the OpenFlow protocol, with ICN-aware nodes only
at the edges of the network, it still offers the same benefits as a clean-slate
ICN architecture but without the deployment hassles. Moreover, by proxying
legacy traffic and transparently forwarding it through the Edge-ICN nodes, all
existing applications can operate smoothly, while offering significant
advantages to applications such as native support for scalable anycast,
multicast, and multi-source forwarding. In this context, we show how the
proposed functionality at the edge of the network can specifically benefit
CoAP-based IoT applications. Our measurements show that Edge-ICN induces on
average the same control plane overhead for name resolution as a centralized
approach, while also enabling IoT applications to build on anycast, multicast,
and multi-source forwarding primitives.
