Locations vs. Identities in Internet Content: Applying Information-centric Principles in Today's Networks

Recently, several proposals for informationcentric networks have surfaced and gained traction. Many of these are focused on developing a clean-slate communication architecture to replace the current model based on TCP/IP. In such architectures also the naming of data needs to be rethought. This article discusses the different approaches to naming, based on the expectations that users have about the names, and the properties that are important to network. We show that HTTP could be used as an information-centric transport protocol, and many of the benefits of information-centric networking could be achieved in the current network architecture with small protocol modifications. We also show an architecture based on using information-centric HTTP proxies and discuss some of the expected performance implications of such approach.