Current content routing solutions will not scale to handle increasing global demands for content. Conventional content routing distributes content delivery but does not effectively distribute content discovery. Further, the proprietary nature of most content routing designs in use today makes them undesirable for global use and are in conflict with the Internet open standard philosophy.
The content layer -- integrated naming and routing -- provides a mechanism for large-scale content routing that addresses these issues. By pushing naming information out into the network, content routers allow fast location of nearby content replicas; in essence, content routers provide the same service for naming that CDNs do for the content itself.
We developed NBRP to distribute names in this fashion and INRP to perform efficient lookup on this distributed integrated named-based routing system. Our results indicate that client name lookup is then faster and far less variable.
The content layer can be easily deployed to provide immediate benefits to ISPs and their customers. Our implementation, and the networking community's experience with BGP, give confidence that name-based routing can scale at least to the demands of content routing for popular content. We anticipate that additional research and experience will demonstrate the feasibility of using name-based routing for all Internet naming.