‘Named data’ Internet architecture would boost capacity, fix address shortages

When your smartphone and iPad are sitting on your kitchen table, it seems pretty reasonable they should be able to talk to each other directly. Except that communicating within the cloud means a lot of travelling. When you send a file to yourself via email, to transfer it from your phone to your tablet, that data signal must travel to a server somewhere before landing in your inbox. Lixia Zhang, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), is leading a research project for a new Internet architecture that would cut down on a lot of data travelling. Called the Named Data Networking (NDN) project, the new architecture would replace today's Internet address-based system (TCP/IP) with one based on unique, authenticated data packets that the network finds by name instead of a server location. In other words, leave it up to the network to find the closest available location for the data you request, which could be stored in a nearby cache (with another user or a network node) or on an original server. “What does an address mean to a car running on the highway? It doesn't really mean much. It's just an identifier, like a cellphone number. If you move into an entirely different paradigm for networking, you throw out the question for whatever data you want, and you leave it to the network to figure out where to get the data,” Zhang said in a phone interview. “And you secure the data by the signature which binds the name to the data.” The NDN model offers a more efficient approach to the Internet as traffic grows exponentially and more connected devices come online, including automatic devices engaged in machine-to-machine communications. Global data centre traffic will rise fourfold between 2012 and 2016, reaching a total of 6.6 zettabytes annually, Cisco Systems Inc. forecasted in a report released last October. Zhang said there appears to be global interest in the NDN project, which has about 15 participating researchers. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' InfoCom conference last year in Orlando, Fla., held two workshops on named-oriented networking, she noted, while the Association for Computing Machinery's SigComm conference in Hong Kong in August will hold another workshop, and Cisco also has a team building an NDN router prototype. "Today, devices next to each other often have to communicate via a centralized server hundreds of miles away. The NDN architecture will enable nearby devices to talk to each other directly,” Zhang said. “We hope it gets deployed on the Internet.” The existing TCP/IP design of the Internet didn't really have security built into it, whereas this new architecture has embedded security, with every data packet carrying a signature that authenticates it, she said. It may be more efficient and secure. The problem with the NDN Internet architecture is that adopting and implementing it would be a major undertaking. Jacques Latour, IT director at the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, said the NDN model could be possible within about 40 years, though that would require creating new standards, defining new protocols, getting the Internet community and global governing bodies to agree to it, ensuring vendors adopt it, and getting support from Internet service providers. “You would need a lot of beer,” Latour said, jokingly. “Even then, I don't know if it's feasible. It's assigning a name to a chunk of data, and in 40 years we're going to have so many chunks of data, it might not be the right way to naming stuff. It might be flawed.” He said although it's an interesting academic exercise, he doesn't see it as the future of the Internet. “If you start from scratch, it's a good idea. When you already have a billion users connected, to migrate to that is not an easy challenge,” Latour said. He noted that other research projects are also looking at superior Internet code and architecture, such as the OpenDaylight project for an industry-supported open source networking platform called Software-Defined Networking. Chris Parsons, a network expert and doctoral candidate at the University of Victoria, said in a phone interview that NDN's plan to “bake in” security to each piece of data would fix one of the problems with today's address-based system. NDN's proposed security would have to be thoroughly tested by cryptologists and other experts, he said. “With TCP/IP, security was not baked in,” he said. “This is an effort to correct what many, in the security community at least, see as a mistake that was made, an early mistake.” NDN would also address the problem of scale on the Internet and a shortage of addresses, though the new Internet protocol IPv6 should fix that, Parsons said, adding that 10 years from now is an optimistic estimate for full IPv6 adoption. NDN's greatest challenge will be working against an already adopted and entrenched Internet architecture. An earlier protocol, X.25, was not successful because TCP/IP was already in place as the standard, he said. “Even if NDN is a superior protocol, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be adopted at all,” he said, adding that it is still an important proposal to research and discuss. “This is really useful for testing the boundaries of the possible.” Zhang said the efficiency of the NDN model would be able to support many more applications for networking than the existing TCP/IP model can, and that in order to get the architecture implemented, it will be necessary to create a demand for it. “NDN aims to solve real problems. When NDN can help people solve real problems, people will want to deploy it. I don't believe in government push to deploy new technology. A good new architecture must be able to solve problems that TCP/IP cannot,” Zhang said. “That problem, number one, is security. We've been working so hard to address security on the Internet.” —With reporting by Simon Doyle at sdoyle@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

‘Named data’ Internet architecture would boost capacity, fix address shortages

News | 06/21/2013 7:44 pm EDT

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