CCN® (Content-Centric Networking)
From the about page:
Project CCNx® exists to develop, promote, and evaluate a new approach to communication architecture we call content-centric networking. We seek to carry out this mission by creating and publishing open protocol specifications and an open source software reference implementation of those protocols. We provide support for a community of people interested in experimentation, research, and building applications with this technology, all contributing to its evolution.
Research Origins and Current State
CCNx technology is still at an early stage of development, with pure infrastructure and no applications, best suited to researchers and adventurous network engineers or software developers. If you’re looking for cool applications ready to download and use, you are a little too early.
Project CCNx is sponsored by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and is based upon the PARC Content-Centric Networking (CCN) architecture, which is the focus of a major, long-term research and development program. There are interesting problems in many areas still to be solved to fully realize and apply the vision, but we believe that enough of an architectural foundation is in place to enable significant experiments to begin. Since this new approach to networking can be deployed through middleware software communicating in an overlay on existing networks, it is possible to start applying it now to solve communication problems in new ways. Project CCNx is an invitation to join us and participate in this exploration of the frontier of content networking.
An odd echo of my post earlier today on HSA – Heterogeneous System Architecture, where heterogeneous processors share the same data.
The abstract from the paper, Networking Named Content by Van Jacobson, Diana K. Smetters, James D. Thornton, Michael F. Plass, Nicholas H. Briggs and Rebecca L. Braynard (2009), gives a good overview:
Network use has evolved to be dominated by content distribution and retrieval, while networking technology still speaks only of connections between hosts. Accessing content and services requires mapping from the what that users care about to the network’s where. We present Content-Centric Networking (CCN) which treats content as a primitive – decoupling location from identity, security and access, and retrieving content by name. Using new approaches to routing named content, derived heavily from IP, we can simultaneously achieve scalability, security and performance. We implemented our architecture’s basic features and demonstrate resilience and performance with secure file downloads and VoIP calls.
I rather like that: “…requires mapping from the what that users care about to the network’s where.”
As a user I don’t care nearly as much where content is located as I do about the content itself.
Do you?
You may have to get out your copy of TCP IP Illustrated by W. Richard Stevens but it will be worth the effort.
I haven’t gone over all the literature but I haven’t seen any mention of the same data originating from multiple addresses. Not the caching of content, that’s pretty obvious but the same named content at different locations.
The usual content semantic issues plus being able to say that two or more named contents are the same content.