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Contents
Names, identifiers, and addresses...............................................................................................1
Identifier.............................................................................................................................................1
Flat naming........................................................................................................................................2
Client stub/server stub chart.............................................................................................................2
Home-Based Approaches.................................................................................................................3
Principle of Mobile IP.........................................................................................................................3
Distributed hash table........................................................................................................................3
Hierarchical Approaches (lookup operation exploits locality).......................................................4

Names, identifiers, and addresses

A name is a string of bits or characters that is used to refer to an entity.
An entity can be practically anything:
 Hosts, printers, disks, and files;
 Processes, users, mailboxes, newsgroups, Web pages, graphical
windows,
messages, network connections.
Address is a type of name:
• An entity can offer more than one access point each with an address.
• An entity may change its access points in the course of time.
• An address is thus just a special kind of name, very inflexible and often
human
unfriendly.
• Not clear which address to use as a reference in case of more than one
AP >>
use a single name for different addresses.

Identifier
A true identifier is another type of name with properties:
1. An identifier refers to at most one entity.
2. Each entity is referred to by at most one identifier.
3. An identifier always refers to the same entity (i.e., it is never reused).
E.g., MAC address. A media access control address (MAC address) is a
unique identifier

Human-friendly name:
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• E.g., domain names;

• Issue of name, address, identifier resolution;

Flat naming
Flat name, or structured name, does not contain any information on how to
locate the access point of its associated entity;
• E.g., identifier.
Solutions for flat-name resolution issue:
• Broadcast and multicast;
• Forwarding pointer:
 When an entity moves from A to B, it leaves behind in A a reference
to its
new location at B.
 Advantage: Easily traced.
 Disadvantages:
• Long chains; • Intermediate points’ burden; • Broken links;
 Challenges:
• Keep chains short, • Ensure that forwarding pointers are
robust.
(the vulnerability of broken links. As soon as any forwarding pointer is
lost (for whatever reason) the entity can no longer be reached)

Client stub/server stub chart

Home-Based Approaches
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Applied in large-scale networks (when broadcasting & forward pointer

impose scalability problems) which keeps track of the current location of an
entity >> safeguard against network or process failures.  

Is used as a fall-back mechanism for location services based on

forwarding pointers. E.g: Mobile IP
Principle of Mobile IP

Disadvantage:

an increase in communication latency: where home may be at a completely

different location than the entity itself in order to contact a mobile entity

Need a fixed home location and it must be always exists 

Solution: register the home at a traditional naming service and to let a client
first look up the location of the home. Because the home location can be
assumed to be relatively stable, that location can be effectively cached after it
has been looked up.

Distributed hash table

In DHT-based system Chord:
 Each node has an m-bit random identifier
 Each entity has an m-bit random key
 An entity with key k is located on a node with the smallest identifier
•that satisfies id>=k, denoted as succ(k)
The major task is key lookup, i.e.,
 I.e., to resolve an m-bit key to the address of succ(k)
 Two approaches: linear approach and finger table
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The simplest form of chord does not consider

Advantage:
 Highly scalable: automatically distributes load to new nodes
 Distributed storage of things with know names
 Robust against node failure: except for bootstrap nodes, data
automatically migrated away from failed nodes
 Self-organizing: central server not needed,
Disadvantage:
 Searching: consequence of hash algorithm, abc and abcd are totally
different nodes
 Security problems: hard to verify data integrity, secure routing is an
open problem

Hierarchical Approaches (lookup operation exploits locality)

In a hierarchical scheme:

A network is divided into a collection of domains. Each domain can be

subdivided into multiple, smaller subdomains

A single top-level domain that spans the entire network. A lowest-level

(leaf) domain typically corresponds to a local-area network in a computer
network or a cell in a mobile telephone network.

 This leads to a tree of directory nodes. The directory node of the top-level
domain, called the root (directory) node, knows about all entities.

The advantage of the latter is that an address becomes available for lookups
as soon as possible. Consequently, if a parent node is temporarily
unreachable, the address can still be looked up within the domain represented
by the current node.