A Case for a Global Information Network

There is an ever increasing gap between how the “common man” would describe the Internet and how a network researcher would. This is not surprising, as the “packet with a label identifying the receiver” model seems to be an ill fitting abstraction for popular services provided by companies such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter.

These services are primarily about information dissemination and a suitable network service abstraction should really do more than deliver individual packets with minimal latency. We argue that we should adopt an information-centric system model instead of the current service oriented one. Instead of dealing with information exchange between specific services on a case by case bases, we should instead consider a global information storage and dissemination network on which individual applications and services are built.

In this talk I will discuss our vision the future architecture and give a brief overview on our progress so far.

Yan Shvartzshnaider is a PhD Candidate in the school of Engineering and Information Technologies in the University of Sydney and a graduate researcher in National ICT Australia (NICTA), Networking Group in ATP lab. His research focus is on large scale networking systems, in particular, developing a fully distributed information-centric networking abstraction.