Information Centric Networks: A New Paradigm for the Internet

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Content Distribution on the Internet

In the beginning, Internet applications were based on textual information. Users were used to exchange email messages, transfer files via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and access remote servers. Today, the Internet is a complex multimedia-information system based on content distribution. Documents, videos, audio, images, Web pages, for example, are “contents” [PLA 05]. Metadata used to find, understand and manage contents are also considered “contents”. However, in order to enable users to request and receive contents efficiently, several basic requirements must be satisfied. First, content persistence must be assured. Persistence means that content identifiers¹ should be unique and valid during the lifetime of the associated content. Recently, with the advent of Web 2.0, the number of content publishers has hugely increased. Today, even users with low technical knowledge are able to publish content on the Internet easily. Thus, it is quite hard to assure content persistence in the current Internet. The second requirement is scalability. Content-search and forwarding mechanisms should be efficient regardless of the number of users and contents offered. Both must be able to operate at Internet scale. Finally, the secure access to contents is an important requirement to provide authentication and access control mechanisms to available contents. Currently, there is no solution that satisfies all these three requirements at the same time. Several ...