Distributed Information Object Resolution

The established host-centric networking paradigm is challenged due to handicaps related with disconnected operation, mobility, and broken locator/identifier semantics. This paper soberly examines another topic of great interest: distributed information object resolution. After recapping the notion of an information object, we review object resolution in today's Internet which is based on Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). We revisit the implications of DNS involvement in URI resolution and discuss how two different types of content distribution networks work with respect to name resolution. Then we evaluate proposals championing the replacement of DNS with alternatives based on distributed hash tables. We present the pros and cons and highlight the importance of latency in resolution. The paper positions these issues in the context of a Network of Information (NetInf) and concludes with open research topics in the area.