In today's dynamic and mobile networked world, people and organizations want efficient and secure access to exploding collections of digital content and services, from everywhere.

The Internet at its most fundamental level, however, implements connections between machines, not location-independent access to content.

This mismatch between the structure and use of networks causes complexity for applications, which have to translate from a user's "what" to the network's "where," brittleness, and ineffective use of available bandwidth.

Security is an afterthought, based on where content comes from not the content itself. These problems have spawned a patchwork of partial solutions.

Content-centric networking is PARC's vision for taking the next step in data communication — a change in network architecture to make content retrieval by name, not location, the fundamental operation of the network. Our approach is to reuse and build upon successful features of TCP/IP, with the key change of replacing the machine-oriented IP model with a named content model as the basis for the central protocol that connects networks.

Using new approaches to routing named content, similar to IP routing — and including integrated content-based security — we can achieve scalability, security, and performance in a single unified solution to myriad networking problems.

applications

Content-centric networking is a general-network architecture in the pattern of TCP/IP. It can support any current networking application in the Internet, or within an enterprise's intranet. Content-centric networking offers benefits in security, performance, robustness, and operational cost, but the mix of benefits that apply will vary with the application.

VOIP

Content-centric networking‘s content-based security enables encrypted phone calls with simple, "single-point" configuration of devices during deployment: simultaneously more secure and less expensive to manage than typical internal VOIP solutions.

Enterprise content management

Content-centric networking enables automatic, secure replication, and intrinsic caching to minimize bandwidth utilization for widely accessed content without significant operational overhead. Content-centric networking is designed to be deployed incrementally, within existing, unmodified TCP/IP networks, so it is possible to prototype solutions without disruption.

We are interested in hearing about your application ideas. Contact PARC for a demonstration.


Read ACM Queue Q&A with PARC research fellow Van Jacobson.