(no subject)

Review: An Architecture for Content Routing Support in the Internet

Reviewer: Di Niu

As content distribution systems become prevalent in the Internet,
they account for a major part of the Internet traffic. In order to
effectively locate content replica in the network and to route client
requests to a nearby replica of the content, this paper proposes a
content routing system that forms part of an explicit Internet
content layer. And it is claimed that the proposed system provides
better latency and scalability than contemporary approaches.

Contemporary content routing systems are not efficient in locating
the content desired. For example, DNS-based content routing can
actually incur significant latency in the network. In contrast, in
the proposed content-layer routing scheme, clients desire
connectivity not to a particular server or IP address bu to some
piece of content, specified by name. It provides support in the core
of the Internet to distribute, maintain, and make use of information
about content reachability. This is performed by routers which are
extended to support naming. These content routers act as both
conventional IP routers and name servers, and participate in both IP
routing and name-based routing. This integration forms the basis of
the content layer.

However, I'm so sure how much this content-layer routing contributes
to the technology. With the upsurge of various kinds of effective P2P
file-sharing protocols, this technique which requires modification at
lower layers may never see the day of the light. For example, in
BitTorrent, peers that are interested in the same content are
organized into the same network, and fine-granularity download is
adopted in the protocol, with the content broken up into pieces.
Received on Thu Nov 30 2006 - 11:02:01 EST