Content-Oriented Networking: a New Experience for Content Transfer. – CONNECT

CONNECT will contribute to the definition and evaluation of a new paradigm for the future Internet: a content-centric networking (CCN) architecture where, rather than interconnecting remote hosts like IP, the network directly manages the information objects that users wish to publish, retrieve and exchange. The project will build on existing CCN proposals in Europe and the US, adopting as a starting point the concept currently promoted by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) team led by Van Jacobson.
In the PARC vision of CCN, content is divided into packet-size chunks identified by a unique name having a particular hierarchical structure. The name and content can be cryptographically encoded and signed, providing a range of security levels and generally ensuring content is verifiable, of known provenance and relevant to user requirements. Packets in CCN carry names rather than addresses and this has a fundamental impact on the way the network works.
Security concerns are addressed at the content level, relaxing requirements on hosts and the network. Users no longer need a universally known address, greatly facilitating management of mobility and intermittent connectivity. Content is supplied under receiver control, limiting scope for denial of service attacks and similar abuse. Since chunks are self-certifying, they can be freely replicated, facilitating caching and thereby bringing significant bandwidth economies. CCN applies to both stored content and to content that is dynamically generated, as in a telephone conversation, for example.
While the CCN paradigm has some clear advantages, the architecture is incompletely defined and it remains to thoroughly evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of the proposal. CONNECT will concentrate its efforts on three main design areas: traffic controls and resource sharing mechanisms for the core and access segments; a scalable naming, routing and forwarding framework; caching strategies in single nodes and over the network. The objective is to propose original mechanisms and protocols adapted to the CCN framework, to demonstrate their scalability and to evaluate their performance.
In addition, CONNECT will consider how CCN can eventually come to replace IP as the basis of the Internet architecture. The considered approach is to study some typical use cases for which CCN has some clear advantages. A particular objective will be to verify that the enhanced security model of CCN indeed removes the problems that face IP and allows the development of some interesting new applications.
Simulation and emulation tools will be developed to validate and test the mechanisms and protocols proposed by CONNECT and to ensure seamless integration with open source CCN software produced elsewhere.
The work is organized in 5 main tasks devoted respectively to Traffic Control and Resource Sharing, Routing and Naming, Caching Strategies and Bandwidth Memory Tradeoffs, Use Cases and Security, Experimentation and Disseminations. Project duration is 2 years. The expected outcome is a set of algorithms and protocols to realize the objectives of the technical tasks. Deliverables will be mainly in the form of reports but also include simulation and emulation platforms for experimentation.