Scenarios and Research Issues for a Network of Information

This paper describes ideas and items of work within the framework of the EU-funded 4WARD project. We present scenarios where the current host-centric approach to information storage and retrieval is ill-suited for and explain how a new networking paradigm emerges, by adopting the information-centric network architecture approach, which we call Network of Information (NetInf). NetInf capitalizes on a proposed identifier/locator split and allows users to create, distribute, and retrieve information using a common infrastructure without tying data to particular hosts. NetInf introduces the concepts of information and data objects. Data objects correspond to the particular bits and bytes of a digital object, such as text file, a specific encoding of a song or a video. Information objects can be used to identify other objects irrespective of their particular digital representation. After discussing the benefits of such an indirection, we consider the impact of NetInf with respect to naming and governance in the Future Internet. Finally, we provide an outlook on the research scope of NetInf along with items for future work.