Network Names in Content-Centric Networking

Content-centric networking (CCN) is a networking paradigm that emphasizes request-response-based data transfer. A consumer issues a request explicitly referencing desired data by name. A producer assigns a name to each data it publishes. Names are used both to identify data to and route traffic between consumers and producers. The type, format, and representation of names are fundamental to CCN. Currently, names are represented as human-readable application-layer URIs. This has several important security and performance implications for the network. In this paper, we propose to transparently decouple application-layer names from their network-layer counterparts. We demonstrate a mapping between the two namespaces that can be deterministically computed by consumers and producers, using application names formatted according to the standard CCN URI scheme. Meanwhile, consumers and producers can continue to use application-layer names. We detail the computation and mapping function requirements and discuss their impact on consumers, producers, and routers. Finally, we comprehensively analyze several mapping functions to show their functional equivalence to standard application names and argue that they address several issues that stem from propagating application names into the network.