Resource Name-Based Routing in the Network Layer

New network architectures and routing technologies are being proposed to reflect the changes in the current trend of Internet communication that are becoming more and more resource-centric; the demand for the hierarchically structured resource in the network is emphasized, not the location of the resource. Therefore, routing by the resource rather than routing by the conventional Internet protocol address is more suitable for the future Internet with some attractive advantages such as reducing the burden of resolving identifier to location and achieving higher scalability by using a provider-independent addressing structure. In this paper, we propose resource name-based routing within the routers in the network layer since te ardware architecture should also be able to support the paradigm shift from host-centric to resource-centric communication. Through evaluating the required network architecture and memory size in routers, we show the feasibility of resource name-based routing by using fully qualified domain names (FQDN) as an example of describing structured information. Using approximately 700 million existing FQDNs, the evaluation result shows that resource name-based routing is feasible even when considering the limitations of ternary content addressable memory size in routers.