What Is It?
A new approach to networking that enables networks to self-organize and push relevant content where needed.
Content-centric networking enables communication to happen anywhere, anytime, and with any device - using any available means.
The Benefits of Content-Centric Networking
- Simplifies network use - reduces set-up time and doesn't require manual configuration through firewalls, VPNs, and ad hoc synchronization protocols.
- Provides a seamless, ubiquitous experience - allows people to easily send and receive digital content from multiple locations, mobile devices, and diverse networks.
- Reduces congestion and latency - doesn't send irrelevant or redundant information through network pipelines.
- Improves network performance while reducing operating costs - increases efficiency by at least three orders of magnitude.
- Increases network reliability - robustly delivers information using any available medium.
- Eliminates many security problems - secures information so integrity and trust are properties of the content, not of the channel.
- Supports new and emerging applications - facilitates mobile and wireless access (which are currently relegated to the fringe of the network), and enables broadcast, voice over IP (VoIP), autonomous sensor networks, ubiquitous applications, and context-aware computing.
- Empowers the user - allows people to express intent to their networks (e.g., to prioritize specific content over others) and prioritizes their needs from inside the network.
The Problems Content-Centric Networking Addresses
People live on virtual islands of connectivity. They have trouble accessing digital resources that are spread across:
- Firewalled computers
- Volatile VPN setups
- Unstable wireless domains
- Mobile locations
- Multiple devices such as laptops, PDAs and cellphones
Similarly, enterprises spend more time setting up, configuring, and connecting to their networks - which contain massive, unstructured, distributed, and often remote information resources - than they spend analyzing and mining this information for useful insights.
Synchronizing and accessing information shouldn't have to be such a difficult task...but it is, because current networking approaches are outdated.
Designed for the technologies of the 1970s, they focus on moving data packets - identified by a geographically fixed, unique IP address - instead of focusing on the information contained in them.
In today's networking environment, everything is mobile, dynamic, and virtually connected to everything else. People are:
- Accessing ever-growing amounts of digital information
- Connecting to diverse, often wireless networks
- using multiple devices to send and receive information
Internet communication has moved from point-to-point conversations between hosts, to point-to-multiparty or multiparty-to-multiparty information dissemination. It's the difference between setting up a phone call between two friends, and hosting a cocktail party. But you can't use a telephone to host a cocktail party - where people engage in multiple conversations, move around, eavesdrop on conversations, and ask nearby guests for information.
The Need for Content-Centric Networking
Networks can no longer focus on just the ends of the network (as in a phone call) - they now need to consider the information and nuanced interactions inside it.
We need networks that:
- Support seamless, mobile, and wireless computing
- Self-organize using any available resource, device, or channel;
- Push content while anticipating and inferring people's needs.
Several ad hoc, patchwork solutions - such as content delivery networks, digital content delivery platforms, DNS servers and digital hash tables, and publish/subscribe messaging systems - already exist at the network layer. This "de facto content layer" attempts to bridge the gap between networks, content, and users - confirming the need for a new, underlying approach to networking.
PARC's Vision for Content-Centric Networking
PARC's "context-aware, content-centric" approach to networking enables named content to migrate wherever it's needed. Meanwhile, network nodes - empowered with more storage and processing power than ever - can exploit the context of the interaction.
Content-centric networking shifts the focus from transmitting data by geographic location, to disseminating it via named content.
How It Works
- Named content doesn't have to reside anywhere in particular, eliminating the need for global topologies.
- With only a name, any device that hears the data request can respond to it.
- Using any means available - IP, VPN tunnels, Zeroconf techniques, multicast, proxies, opportunistic transportation such as planes, and so on - the network acquires the requested content and delivers it to the user.
Content-centric networking won't overhaul existing network pipelines, but it will use them to restructure the way networks manage resources and distribute information.
The Network Itself Doesn't Matter.
The Legacy and the Leader
PARC Research Fellow
Van Jacobson
By intersecting a human-centered approach, diverse application experience, theoretical insights, and cross-disciplinary expertise (including security, embedded systems, machine learning, and ubiquitous computing), PARC is in a unique position to deliver content-centric networking.
PARC's rich legacy of network innovation includes inventing the Ethernet and PUP (early Xerox internet protocol); pioneering client-server and peer-to-peer concepts; advancing IP multicast and Mbone; and co-designing Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).
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