Naming in content-oriented architectures

Abstract

There have been several recent proposals for content-oriented network architectures whose underlying mechanisms are surprisingly similar in spirit, but which differ in many details. In this paper we step back from the mechanistic details and focus only on the area where the these approaches have a fundamental difference: naming. In particular, some designs adopt a hierarchical, humanreadable names, whereas others use self-certifying names. When discussing a network architecture, three of the most important requirements are security, scalability, and flexibility. In this paper we examine the two different naming approaches in terms of these three basic goals.

Converging Future Internet, “Things”, and Big Data: A Specification Following NovaGenesis Model

“…Information centric networking (ICN) proposes self-verifying names (SVNs) as an alternative to NLNs (Ahlgren et al, 2012), so making possible to check the relationship between the named entity and the name at any time. Furthermore, Ghodsi et al (Ghodsi et al, 2011) argue that SVNs have better security, scalability, and flexibility than NLNs. SVNs can also support provenance, non repudiation, and integrity of IoT data and its sources.…”

On information exposure through named content

“…Information can also be characterised by ownership. So far, work in this area has focused on the support of authenticity (or provenance), i.e., enabling users to verify that the received content came from the original source [9], [3]. However, recent research efforts have pointed out the need for supporting content neutrality (see Section II) [4].…”

“…As discussed in [3], the exposure of ownership information depends on the selected naming scheme. With self-certifying names, the binding between the content name and the owner identity must be established by an external authority, while with human-readable hierarchical names the binding is intrinsic in the name.…”

“…Namely, in a two-level name resolution process, users first resolve human readable identifiers to (ICN) network layer self-certifying ones. This resolution step is carried out involving the CP and enables the verification of provenance due to the human-readable hierarchical nature of the name 3 . Subsequently, self-certifying identifiers can be used to guide forwarding decisions inside the network.…”

“…A large corpus of literature focused on this specific aspect, that is, on how to name content objects, how to route them or how to resolve them to routable entities [1], [3], [4]. Research on naming so far has tackled the problem from several angles:…”