ICN software tools: survey and cross-comparison

Research interest on Information Centric Networking (ICN) has been sharply growing. Although new architectures, algorithms, and analytical models have been proposed, their evaluation remains often isolated and not rigorously verified by the research community. This paper initially portrays the composition of open source software tools available for ICN, certifying the predominance of Content Centric Networking (CCN)/Named Data Networking (NDN) simulators. Then, inspired by similar works related to the P2P field, it surveys related research papers to qualify the ICN literature produced so far, finding that a large fraction of contributions either uses custom, proprietary, and unavailable software, or even plainly fails to mention any information in this regard. By adopting a rigorous methodology, in the second part of the paper four simulators, namely ndnSIM, ccnSim, CCNPL-Sim, and Icarus, are cross-compared under several key aspects. Our findings confirm both their accuracy with respect to reference theoretical models in simple settings, and their consistency in more complex scenario. Additionally, our analysis can both assist researchers in the choice of the tool that best fits their needs, and provide guidelines to avoid common pitfalls in the ICN performance evaluation.