Information-Centrism, Semantic, Context, Identification, Mobility, Naming, Indirection Resolution and Routing

Information-centrism, Semantic, Context,
Identification, Mobility, Naming, Indirection

Resolution and Routing
Antônio Marcos Alberti
alberti@inatel.br
antonioalberti@gmail.com
http://antonioalberti.blogspot.com/
www.inatel.br/docentes/alberti
© Antônio M. Alberti 2010
Topics
 Information-centrism
 ID/Loc Splitting
 Indirection Resolution
 Generalized Mobility
 Semantic, Context, Context-Awareness and Ontology
 Semantic Web
 Indirection Resolution
 Routing
1
Information-Centrism
 Current Internet was designed in an era where technological
development was completely different from today.
 Memory, processing and communication resources were very

limited when compared with present resources.
 In this scenario, the principles selected to guide the design of

the Internet have focused on:
 Inter-terminal connectivity throught routers (host-centrism);
 Designing a simple (but robust) forwarding network (KISS
principle), in which more complex features were left to the upper
layers at the terminals (end to end principle);
 End to end communications among computer applications.
 The opneness, flexibility, neutrality, diversity and extendibility of
applications generated by such principles led to the emergence
of the Word Wide Web (WWW) and the popularization of the
Internet.
 “Such movement has led the transformation of the Internet in

the main vehicle for information exchange and is increasingly
changing the way we produce and consume content”, (Alberti
2010).
 “For 150 years ‘communication’ has meant a conversation over

a wire connecting two devices. For users, the Web forever
changed that: Content matters, not where or how you get it,”
(Van Jacobson, 2010).
2
 “The Internet has shifted from being a simple host connectivity
infrastructure to a platform enabling massive content production
and content delivery, transforming the way information is
generated and consumed,” (Rothenberg, 2008).
 While the endpoint-centrism has produced tremendous success

in the last decades, many researchers believe it is time now to
put the spotlight on the information, originating the so called
information-centric approach.
 The idea is to consider information as a key ingredient in

design, since information is everywhere, i.e. contracts, location,
police, IDs, descriptors, naming, etc.
 The motivation is to overcome Internet limitations to support
content distribution and exchanging in a coherent way:
 No support for anycast, i.e. the routing of the nearest copy.
 No consistent content representation, i.e. content lacks on

metadata.
 The difficulty to manipulate data on a contextualized way.
 To deal with identical copies.
 To improve customized experience.
 The lack on securing information, not connections.
3
 Since 2006, many info-centric approaches have emerged and
many believe that this approach allows to overcome the
limitations and distortions caused by host-centrism.
 Some projects cited in literature are:

 I3 (Internet Indirection Infrastructure);
 USA Berkeley project DONA (Data Oriented Network
Architecture);
 EU FP7 project Haggle;
 EU FP7 projects 4WARD NetInf and PSIRP (Publish Subscribe
Internet Routing Paradigm);
 USA CCN (Content Centric Networking) from Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center.
 Recent projects are:
 EU FP7 project SAIL (Scalable and Adaptable Internet Solutions);
 NSF-funded project NDN (Named Data Networking).
4
 Core ideas/requirements (1/5):
 To make information the center of design. “Information is
everything and everything is information”, (PSIRP, 2009).
 To represent persistently and consistently information by means of

Information Objects (IOs), which contain digital signatures,
checksums, metadata, access rights, formats, ontology, etc.
 To access information independently of its location.
 To put flat or hierarchical names on content (or in its

representation).
 “Named content is a better abstraction for today’s communication problems than
named hosts.” “The data associated with the name can’t change. It is
immutable,” (Van Jacobson, 2009).
 To adequately manage content with different versions and
encodings, as well as copies of identical content.
 To use name resolution schemes to find out locators to named

content.
 To allow disruptive and consented communications, e.g.

publish/subscribe (pub/sub) paradigm.
 To enable anycast and multi path routing of previously located

information. To improve multicasting support.
 To efficiently distribute content, customizing and improving Quality

of Experience (QoE).
5
 To cache information to improve performance and efficiency.
 To enable efficient, semantic rich, context-based information

search and manipulation.
 To deal with information scope. “Policy is metadata. So is scope!”,

PSIRP.
 To deal with locality, provenance, ontology and coherence as

advocated by Van Jacobson @ FISS 2009.
 To identify information uniquely.
 To rethink security from the information point of view, securing
information per se as a mean to improve information reliability,
integrity and traceability.
 To explore self-certifying names, i.e. names that contain the result

of a cryptographic hash function over the data.
 To provide secure rendezvous among information producers and

consumers, using trust relations for example.
 To verify publisher privacy before content publishing as well as to

authenticate and authorize subscribers during rendezvous.
6
 To solve indirections dynamically, efficiently, generically and
robustly.
 To deal with scalability on information representation, searching,

naming resolution, location, routing, etc.
 To deal with multi level, multi domain environments.
 To autonomously manipulate content based on high level policies,

goals, privacy, objectives, etc, as advocated by Van Jacobson @
FISS 2009.
ID/Loc Splitting
 Another important point today is that not only the hosts are
identified and located based on IP addresses, but also the
information is, since URLs have domain names, which in
essence lead to IP addresses.
 This is caused because original Internet design defined a dual

functionality for IP addresses:
 To Identify hosts, nodes interfaces or content servers;
 To locate them into the network.
 Because the shortage of valid IPv4 addresses in the Internet,

NAT has emerged as a solution to enable IP addresses reuse.
7
ID/Loc Splitting
 As a consequence, IP addresses are frequently changed,
generating some sort of “identity loss”, which ultimately may
lead to inconsistencies in information and host localization.
 User, information and hosts traceability is greatly affected by

this situation, since the relation between user profiles and IP
addresses is difficult to obtain.
 In addition, such frequent changes limits mobility, localization,

roaming and multihoming support on the Internet.
 “The use of a single IP address as both node identifier and

location identifier (called locator) causes problems with mobility
and multihoming management, network renumbering, security
and privacy, scalable routing, and traffic engineering,” (Akari
v2.0, 2010).
ID/Loc Splitting
 There is a fair consensus that future networks should separate
identifiers (ID) from locators (Loc), creating the so called ID/Loc
split.
 This split is required not only for physical entities (e.g. hosts),
but also for virtual entities as well as for content.
 “When identifiers are decoupled from locators, it is possible to

move things without “loss of identity”. Thus, when a terminal
moves from a geographic region A to B, locators change, but
identifiers remain the same, allowing all the other functions to
work properly” (Alberti, 2010).
8
ID/Loc Splitting
 This idea could be extended to uniquely identify every logical or
physical entity in the network as well as information, so they can
be moved, searched and localized without change their
identities.
 This means that physical entities, such as nodes, radios, hosts,

persons, etc, need to have their own digital identities, which
uniquely identify them.
 Thus, physical entities could be physically (geographically) or

logically (e.g. logical position in a architecture) located, e.g.:
 To determine the geographical location of a person.
 To determine the logical attachment point that virtualizes a portion
of a physical interface in a virtual network.
ID/Loc Splitting
 Logical entities, such as software services, service-based
applications, business processes, virtual networks, etc, also
need to have their own unique identities.
 They could also be physically or logically located, e.g.:

 To determine the geographical location for a context-aware
service that depends on such information.
 To determine the logical attachment point where a service
transfers information in a virtual network.
 ID/Loc decoupling is also helpful to satisfy an old desire:

generalized mobility.
9
ID/Loc Splitting
 Some projects are:
 Mobile IP;
 HIP (Host Identity Protocol);
 LISP (Locator ID Separation Protocol);
 LNA (Layered Naming Architecture);
 MILSA (Mobility and Multihoming Supporting Identifier Locator
Split Architecture);
 South Korean MOFI (Mobile-Oriented Future Internet) ETRI
project;
 Japanese new generation network project Akari.
ID/Loc Splitting
 Some benefits of ID/Loc splitting:
 IDs become persistent, therefore enhancing accountability;
 Traceability based on persistent IDs discourage network misuse;
 Unique IDs enhances digital credentials;
 IDs help to authenticate and authorize entities;
 Persistent IDs enable autonomic security mechanisms;
 Granted trust relations could be established among entities based

on IDs.
10
ID/Loc Splitting
 However, ID/Loc splitting brings some challenges:
 How to generate unique digital identifiers for real or virtual
entities?
 How to manage IDs in order to provide generalized mobility for
real or virtual entities?
 How to deal with privacy, anonymity and traceability?
 Unique IDs can provide information sources non-repudiation.
 How to use accountability information to prevent or to punish
cyber crimes?
 How to manage the large number of IDs, their relationships and
lifecycles?
 There is a massive scalability problem here!
 How to manage credentials and their relations to IDs?
 How to discovery IDs of real or virtual entities?
Generalized Mobility
 General mobility means to comprehensively support user,
terminal, service, application, virtual networks, information, and
other real and virtual entities mobility.
 The challenge behind generalized mobility justifies why unique

identifiers are needed – it is because we want to move real or
virtual entities as well as information, without loss of identity –
and we want to continue finding them during and/or after
movement.
11
Generalized Mobility
 Some efforts concerned with mobility are:
 FP6 project MUSE (Multi Service Access Everywhere) and
Winner;
 EU FP7 eMobility platform (Mobile and Wireless Communications
Technology Platform) and project Mobile Web 2.0;
 EUA MobilityFirst project.
Semantic, Context, Context-Awareness and Ontology

 Semantic
 “Relating to meaning in language or logic”, Thesaurus Dictionary.
 For (Pei Wang, 2004) “semantics is the study of the relation

between a language and the environment in which the language is
used”. A language could be natural or artificial.
 “Reflecting intended structure and meaning”, Wiktionary.
 “Refers to the meaning of languages, as opposed to their form

(syntax)”, Wikipedia.
12
 Context
 (Dey and Abowd, 2000) define context as “any information that
can be used to characterize the situation of entities (…) that are
considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an
application, including the user and the application themselves”.
 (Giunchiglia, 1992) defines context as a “subset of the complete

state of an individual that is used for reasoning about a given goal”
[13].
 Situation
 (Zimmermann, 2005) defines situation as “the state of a context at
a certain point (or region) in space at a certain point (or interval) in
time, identified by a name”.

 Context-Awareness
 According to (Baker et al., 2009) “context awareness refers to the
capability of an application, service or even an artefact being
aware of its physical environment or situation and responding
proactively and intelligently based on such awareness”.
 NEXOF-RA defines context-awareness as “the ability of

applications and services to adapt their behaviour, interface or
contents to the target context, providing a more consistent and
effective interaction”.
13
 Ontology
 (Gruber, 1993) defines ontology as “a shared, formal
conceptualization of a domain”.
 In (Ben Yahia et al., 2007) an “ontology is defined as common

vocabulary source that provides shared understanding between
concepts and relationship between them”.
 For (TripCom, 2008) “an ontology is a formal definition of

terminology and relationships among the terms in a computer-
processable form”.

 (Baker et al., 2009) defends that context-awareness has an
important role in a new Internet, since applications, artifacts and
systems need to be aware of their environment as well as to
intelligently self-adapt to environmental changes.
 It becomes evident from this idea that autonomicity is required

to enable a system/application/artifact to adapts to
environmental or goal changes.
 The work also relates situation with context:

 Situation is a snapshot of related context information at a certain
time and space.
14
 (Baker et al., 2009) work also has strong relation with RWI,
since they propose the vision of “intelligent things” and “smart
spaces”, giving rise to the term Internet of Aware-Things.
 The paper also argues that the distribution of obtained contexts

to the interested parties can be made through the collaboration
of context processing entities using the publish/subscribe
paradigm.
 This is right the scope of the FP7 project C-CAST (Context-

Casting).
 The paper also discusses the application of such idea on the

scope of SOA, creating the vision of the Internet of Context-
aware Services.

 (Bicocchi N. et al., 2010) defends the creation of KNs
(Knowledge Networks) to avoid that services and applications
need to access and assimilate per se large amounts of
information in order to achieve situation-awareness.
 In other words, KNs self-organize to create ecosystems that can

autonomically process, combine and make available relevant
information to services, freeing them from achieving situation-
awareness by their own.
 The work is part of the FP7 project CASCADAS and shares

many goals with the idea of the Knowledge Plane from (David
Clark et al., 2003).
15
Semantic Web
 It is an idea advocated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which is often
cited as the father of the current World Wide Web.
 It means to define the meaning for information and how to treat

it, so that the web can “understand” what people and machines
want. “It means to build an autonomous knowledge web,
including context-aware applications and services composition,”
(Alberti, 2010).
 The proposal argues that to enable customized experience, we

need “to abstract from the syntax to semantics,” (Lee, 1999).
Semantic Web
 Some efforts from the semantic point of view are:
 W3C Semantic Web (World Wide Web Consortium Semantic
Web);
 EU FP7 projects Service Web 3.0 and SOA4ALL (Service
Oriented Architectures for All), SHAPE (Semantically-enabled
Heterogeneous service Architecture and Platforms Engineering),
C-CAST (Context-Casting).
 “W3C Semantic web defines a stack composed by several

standards and tools, such Extensible Markup Language (XML),
Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology
Language (OWL),” (Alberti, 2010).
16
Indirection Resolution
 “Indirection is the ability to reference something using a name,
reference, or container instead of the value itself.” Wikipedia.
 For (Pollock and Hodgson, 2004) “indirection is a concept that is

used to plan for future uncertainty. Simply put, indirection is
when two things need to be coupled, but instead of coupling
them directly, a third thing is used to mediate direct, brittle
connections between them”.
 They contend that “in a semantic framework indirection is a

fundamental aspect of ensuring loose coupling for the purposes
of efficient, dynamic, and automated information sharing”.
 A long time computer scientists discuss the role of indirection in
the software environment.
 In 1972, Butler Lampson did a famous quotation regarding

indirection:
 “All problems in computer science can be solved by another level
of indirection”.
 As one would expect, the concept appears in the current

Internet as well as in several proposals to design new network
architectures.
17
 (Siekkinen et al., 2007) argues that the indirection is another
point where current Internet lacks on adequate support.
 NetInf and PSIRP information-centric approaches apply

indirection to decouple information objects from their storage
sites.
 ANA (Autonomic Network Architecture) uses generic indirection

systems – IDPs (Information Dispatch Points) – to store many
information, including bindings between functional entities to
create an evolving protocol stack.
 “Indirection (i.e. flexibility, loose binding) is built-in by default in

the core node machinery” at ANA (Jelger, 2009).
 i3 (Internet Indirection Infrastructure) uses indirection principle
to support mobility and multi-homing in the Internet.
 The ANA IDP has some resemblance with i3.
 HIP (Host Identification Protocol) creates an indirection layer

between host IDs and locators.
 In fact, indirection resolution systems are used on the majority

of ID/Loc splitting, name resolution and information-centric
approaches.
 More research is needed to accurately determine the role of

indirection in future networks design.
18
Routing
 With the emerging desire to redesign architectures, the role of
routing has been revisited and many new approaches have
emerged:
 ROFL (Routing On Flat Labels);
 DONA (Data-Oriented Network Architecture) overlay routing;
 NetInf LLC (Late Locator Construction) and MDHTs (Multiple
Distributed Hash Tables);
 CCN named content routing;
 PSIRP (Publish-Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm);
 XOR-based flat routing;
 SPSwitch bloom-filter-based-forwarding;
 LANES inter-domain data-oriented routing architecture.
References
 Jacobson V, Content-Centric Networking, Future Internet
Assembly (FIA), Valencia, Spain, 2010.
 Rothenberg CE, Verdi FL, Magalhaes, M (2008) Towards a New

Generation of Information-Oriented Internetworking
Architectures. Re-Architecting the Internet, Madrid, Spain.
 Berners-Lee T, Hendler J, Lassila O (1999) The Semantic Web.

Scientific American Magazine 23(1).
 Alberti A, (2010) Future Network Architectures: Technological

Challenges and Trends, New Network Architectures: The Path
to the Future Internet. Book Chapter. Springer-Verlag GmbH.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-13247-6_5. 2010.
19
References
 Jacobson V, Smetters D, Thornton J, Plass M, Briggs N,
Braynard R (2009) Networking Named Content. CoNEXT’09,
Rome, Italy.
 Ahlgren B, D’Ambrosio M, Dannewitz C, Marchisio M, Marsh I,

Ohlman B, Pentikousis K, Rembarz R, Strandberg O,
Vercellone V (2008) Design Considerations for a Network of In-
formation. Re-Architecting the Internet, Madrid, Spain.
 Tarkoma S, Ain M, Visala K (2009) The Publish/Subscribe

Internet Routing Paradigm (PSIRP): Designing the Future
Internet Architecture. Towards the Future Internet, IOS Press.
 4WARD (2010) Architecture and Design for the Future Internet:

Second NetInf Architecture Description. Deliverable D6.2.
References
 Ohlman B, Ahlgren B, et al. (2010) Networking of Information:
An Information-centric Approach to the Network of Future. ETSI
Future Network Technologies Workshop.
 Niebert N (2008) Vision on Future Content Networks: A

Networks and Media Joint Venture. Future Internet Assembly
(FIA), Madrid, Spain.
 Paulson LD (2003) News Briefs - W3C Works on Semantic Web

Proposal. Computer Magazine 36(11):20
 Fensel D (2007) ServiceWeb 3.0. IEEE/WIC/ACM International

Conf. on Intelligent Agent Technology, Fremont, USA.
20
References
 Baker N, Zafar M, Moltchanov B, Knappmeyer M (2009)
Context-Aware Systems and Implications for Future Internet,
Towards the Future Internet, IOS Press.
 Bicocchi N, Baumgarten M, Brgulja N, Kusber R, Mamei M,

Mulvenna M, Zambonelli F (2010) Self-Organized Data
Ecologies for Pervasive Situation-Aware Services: The
Knowledge Networks Approach, IEEE Transactions on
Systems, Man and Cybernetics – Part A: System and Humans,
Vol. 40, No. 4.
 Dey A, Abowd D (2000) Towards a better understanding of

context and context-awareness, Proc. ACM Conf. Human
Factors Comput. Syst.—What, Who, Where, When and How of
Context-Awareness, Hague, The Netherlands.
References
 Zimmermann A et al. (2005) Personalization and Context
Management, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 15,
3-4, pp. 275-302.
 Giunchiglia F (1992) Contextual Reasoning, Trento, Italy.
 Wang P (2004) Experience-Grounded Semantics: A theory for

intelligent systems, Preprint submitted to Elsevier Science.
 Gruber T (1993) A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology

Specifications. Knowledge Acquisition, 5:199–220.
 TripCom (2008) Ontology of EDIFACT Syntax and Semantics,

Deliverable D7.2.
21
References
 Ben Yahia I, Bertin E, Crespi N (2007) Ontology-based
Management Systems for the Next Generation Services: State-
of-the-Art, presented in Networking and Services, 2007. ICNS
Third International Conference and published in IEEE
Transaction.
 Clark D, Partridge C, Ramming C, Wroclawski J (2003) A

knowledge plane for the Internet, Proc. ACM SIGCOMM Conf.,
Karlsruhe, Germany, pp. 3–10.
 Siekkinen M, et al. (2007) Beyond the Future Internet –

Requirements of Autonomic Networking Architectures to
Address Long Term Future Networking Challenges, 11th IEEE
International Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed
Computing Systems (FTDCS'07).
References
 Jelger C (2009) Information Dispatch Points, NetArch
Symposium Presentation, Ascona, Switzerland.
 Pollock J, Hodgson R (2004) Adaptive information: improving

business through semantic interoperability, grid computing, and
enterprise integration, John Wiley and Sons.
22

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Information-centrism, Semantic, Context,

Identification, Mobility, Naming, Indirection

Antônio Marcos Alberti

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 Memory, processing and communication resources were very

 In this scenario, the principles selected to guide the design of

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 “Such movement has led the transformation of the Internet in

 “For 150 years ‘communication’ has meant a conversation over

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 While the endpoint-centrism has produced tremendous success

 The idea is to consider information as a key ingredient in

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 No consistent content representation, i.e. content lacks on

 The difficulty to manipulate data on a contextualized way.

 To deal with identical copies.

 To improve customized experience.

 The lack on securing information, not connections.

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 Some projects cited in literature are:

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 To represent persistently and consistently information by means of

 To access information independently of its location.

 To put flat or hierarchical names on content (or in its

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 To use name resolution schemes to find out locators to named

 To allow disruptive and consented communications, e.g.

 To enable anycast and multi path routing of previously located

 To efficiently distribute content, customizing and improving Quality

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 To enable efficient, semantic rich, context-based information

 To deal with information scope. “Policy is metadata. So is scope!”,

 To deal with locality, provenance, ontology and coherence as

 To identify information uniquely.

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 To explore self-certifying names, i.e. names that contain the result

 To provide secure rendezvous among information producers and

 To verify publisher privacy before content publishing as well as to

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 To deal with scalability on information representation, searching,

 To deal with multi level, multi domain environments.

 To autonomously manipulate content based on high level policies,

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 This is caused because original Internet design defined a dual

 Because the shortage of valid IPv4 addresses in the Internet,

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 User, information and hosts traceability is greatly affected by

 In addition, such frequent changes limits mobility, localization,

 “The use of a single IP address as both node identifier and

 “When identifiers are decoupled from locators, it is possible to

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 This means that physical entities, such as nodes, radios, hosts,

 Thus, physical entities could be physically (geographically) or

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 They could also be physically or logically located, e.g.:

 ID/Loc decoupling is also helpful to satisfy an old desire:

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

© Antônio M. Alberti 2010

 Traceability based on persistent IDs discourage network misuse;

 Unique IDs enhances digital credentials;

 IDs help to authenticate and authorize entities;