Information-Centric Networking: A Natural Design for Social Network Applications

Millions of people now use online social network applications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. This kind of application offers the freedom for end users to easily share contents on the Internet. In parallel with the expansion of OSNs, a new networking paradigm emerges, the information-centric networking approach, where the focus is on the content the user wishes to obtain instead of the server that provides this content: a content-based approach instead of a host-centric one. Looking at the ICN concept, and more precisely the CCN (which stands for content-centric networking) solution in this article (based on Interest-Data messages), and at OSNs behavior (users subscribing to contents posted by another user in case of Twitter, or the notion of friends receiving contents from others friends in Facebook), we advocate that the CCN paradigm perfectly fits with the OSN applications behavior and can help to save network load. In this article, we describe how OSN applications can run with the CCN solution and the evaluation we have performed highlights the benefit of using such a CCN approach compared to the current classical IP-based delivery and to the CDN-based solution, for the use-case of Twitter. Depending on the CCN nodes location and the cache efficiency, the network load can be significantly reduced and the response time to get the content can be faster up to 60 percent.