In 2009 singer Susan Boyle's extremely popular YouTube video of the Les Miserables song "I Dreamed a Dream" racked up 140 million hits in just four days, the equivalent of a digital tsunami that blasted the Internet with gale-force winds. Given that the Internet was created more than four decades ago primarily as a communications network, few content providers other than Google could have successfully managed the storm of requests coming in for access to that video without crashing.

The Internet was designed for "computers to make phone calls to other computers, and that's a really inefficient way of distributing content," Van Jacobson, a former research fellow at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), said in a 2011 video interview on the company’s Web site. YouTube successfully handled the inundation of requests for Boyle's video "because they're a big, distributed content source spread out all over the planet, so they wouldn't get the kind of traffic concentration that would prevent something from working. Basically, Google's the only place that can do that."

The Susan Boyle YouTube phenomenon punctuated Jacobson's contention, shared by many computer scientists worldwide, that the Internet is desperately in need of a makeover to transform it from a network that emphasizes where data is located to one that focuses more on the nature of the data itself.

From his arrival at the Xerox subsidiary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 2006 until his departure in October, Jacobson led the organization's Project CCNx effort to overcome the current Internet architecture's shortcomings as a media distribution platform. "The goal of content-centric networking is to get out of this phone-call world and instead ask the network for what you want," says Jacobson, who in the 1980s helped improve TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), the protocol that the Internet uses to handle network congestion. Jacobson is still involved in the Named Data Networking (NDN) Project, an 11-university research program funded under the National Science Foundation’s Future Internet Architectures Project.

Changing times
Since its inception as a system of interconnected computer networks in the late 1960s and early '70s the Internet has grown into a global electronic backbone for commerce, entertainment, finance, health care and nearly every other facet of life. In addition, the emergence of cloud computing, social networks and the mobile Web have turned the Internet into a distributed system for posting and accessing information from a variety of devices in ways that existing Internet protocols were not designed to accommodate. The location of the data in question—expressed by its IP address—has become less relevant because that data can reside on several different servers (known colloquially as "the cloud") and be stored in short-term cache memory at various locations throughout a network.

Of course, the Internet still functions quite well despite the changing ways in which we use it, but this situation only exists because the basic model for enabling communication between source and destination addresses has been heavily modified over time, a team of researchers noted in the July issue of IEEE Communications Magazine (pdf).

Focusing the Internet's routing infrastructure on content rather than addresses would better accommodate today's speed and security needs. "The interesting thing about allowing routers to use bits in the packets that are not addresses [is] that you can configure a network or network of networks around something other than formal address structures," says Vint Cerf, the Internet pioneer who co-developed TCP/IP and now serves as Google's chief Internet evangelist. In this scenario, content-centric identifiers would tell the routers to forward a particular packet in several directions because there are multiple parties on the Net that are interested in seeing that content, he adds.

Information-centric
There is no shortage of research underway to improve the Internet’s performance and security mechanisms. Some projects aim to boost network speeds or reroute data to meet the growing demands of bandwidth-hogging multimedia content. Others focus on better protecting Net-connected computers, servers and other devices from malicious software and other digital threats. An emerging area of research that includes Project CCNx is information-centric networking (ICN), which seeks to cover all of these bases, and then some.

6 Comments

1. 1. jtdwyer 08:58 AM 12/13/12

   What a deal for Google! The approach being described here is a content addressable storage device (data network). This has been a research topic for several decades now - I'm retired and no longer follow such follies so can't provide any status. There are enormous difficulties - any performance improvements would come at an enormous cost. Also, one basic problem might be that it would remove from the user the ability to select those sites that the user trusts to provide reliable information. Are you really linked to egghead.com or is it mysneakysite.com? You just wanted to find the content you were looking for, right?
   
   "Some projects aim to boost network speeds or reroute data to meet the growing demands of bandwidth-hogging multimedia content."
   
   OMG - what a surprise! Loading commercial high bandwidth applications on the internet free of charge produces negative impact on system response time - who'd have thought? I told you so...

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2. 2. FB3636 in reply to jtdwyer 08:39 PM 12/18/12

   Obviously a hybrid approach is the solution.
   
   There are times you would want the data coming from a certain address (like online banking) and there are times you don't care and just want to get it as fast as possible (like a certain YouTube video).
   
   Of course you would want to be sure you are getting the real original video file but I am sure that problem could be solved using a digital signature.

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3. 3. jtdwyer in reply to FB3636 09:20 PM 12/18/12

   You don't see any other problems then, like which websites satisfying the search content will be accessed? Search for "ipod", for example, and see how many sites meet the search criteria. Should the most popular site always be selected for access? What will other sites do for advertising, since they would never be selected? Should the content address resolution round-robin among all sites that meet the content selection criteria, regardless of any other site characteristics? These are certainly not the only likely problems that would require solution...

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4. 4. hum80 in reply to jtdwyer 01:08 AM 12/20/12

   I would imagine the system to be *fairer* than it is today since delivery is based on the actual information on the network - if I want a Susan Boyle video and my neighbour happens to have already downloaded it, why shouldn't I have it from there rather than going directly to YouTube (probably via a CDN anyway)?
   
   In the ipod example you give, a google search reveals the most "popular" answers first - that's why companies spend so much to move themselves up the results tables. So, the question really should be "What do other sites do now for advertising?"

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5. 5. jtdwyer in reply to hum80 07:28 AM 12/21/12

   Unless the content name also includes the source server name so that the source can be identified as a trusted server by the client user, there's no way to know that the file you're downloading is the video it's purported to be. Including source server name would seem to defeat the objectives of named content networking.
   
   Today, Google searches returns result lists in order of site popularity, but many sources are available for the user to select from and browse through, determining which best satisfies actual user needs.
   
   As I understand, in a purely content addressable environment a list of "Susan Boyle video" search results would not be returned, allowing you to select among them, only the nearest router's cache copy of some file registered as "Susan Boyle video" would be transferred.

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6. 6. oscar867 06:51 AM 1/1/13

   Sorry I'm late to the conversation. Not a single mention of the government censorship of internet content? I( would find this far more worrisome then the source of the content.

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