LOCON: A lookup-based content-oriented networking framework

Abstract

While the current Internet has a host-based TCP/IP architecture, the vast majority of Internet usage is attributed to the content retrieval and distribution. This mismatch has proliferated content delivery network (CDN) technologies and P2P file-sharing systems (e.g., BitTorrent); however, the inefficiency of content delivery is not fundamentally solved, and there are business/operation and content copyright/availability issues, respectively. Also, in the research community, there have been efforts to redesign the current architecture from a content-centric perspective by introducing the route-by-name paradigm and in-network caching, which however entails many issues like the routing scalability and processing overhead. We propose a lookup-based communication framework for content-oriented networking (LOCON), whose main components are locator lookup, coordinated caching, and parallel transmissions. LOCON aims to accommodate incremental deployment, support legacy end-hosts, and provide business incentives between network operators and content publishers. To carry out the experiments, we build a networking testbed on top of Amazon data centers around the world. LOCON performs better than other lookup-by-name networking technologies and CCN (i.e., a route-by-name scheme) in terms of content delivery metrics.