MDHT: a hierarchical name resolution service for information-centric networks

Information-centric network architectures are an increasingly important approach for future Internet architectures. Several approaches are based on a non-hierarchical identifier (ID) namespace that requires some kind of global Name Resolution Service (NRS) to translate the object IDs into network addresses. Building a world-wide NRS for such a namespace with 10 15 expected IDs is challenging because of requirements such as low latency, efficient network utilization, and anycast routing. In this paper, we present an NRS called Multi-level Distributed Hash Table (MDHT). It provides name-based anycast routing, can support constant hop resolution, and fulfills the afore mentioned requirements. A scalability assessment shows that our system can scale to the Internet level, managing 10 15 objects with today's storage technology and 1/10th of today's DNS nodes. The evaluation indicates that a non-hierarchical namespace can be adopted on a global scale, opening up several design alternatives for information-centric network architectures.