Identification and Management of Distributed Data

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Content-Oriented Communication and Conversational Communication

In general, today’s Internet can be seen as a mix of content-oriented communication and conversation-oriented communication. A content-oriented communication pattern takes place when an entity in the network needs specific content irrespective of where it is stored. Content is associated with an identifier (or name in certain contexts), ostensibly unique in a specific namespace.

This simple communication pattern can be described for the network layer with a couple of primitives that allow the user to put content into and get content from the network. This content can be statically stored in a server or streamed live (audio, video, or multimedia); that is, the requesting node ...