Content-Centric Networking & the Next Internet 153
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by
timothy
from the bits-must-still-flow dept.
from the bits-must-still-flow dept.
waderoush writes "PARC research fellow Van Jacobson argues that the Internet was never designed to carry exabytes of video, voice, and image data to consumers' homes and mobile devices, and that it will never be possible to increase bandwidth fast enough to keep up with demand. In fact, he thinks that the Internet has outgrown its original underpinnings as a network built on physical addresses, and that it's time to put aside TCP/IP and start over with a completely novel approach to naming, storing, and moving data. The fundamental idea behind Jacobson's alternative proposal — Content Centric Networking — is that to retrieve a piece of data, you should only have to care about what you want, not where it's stored. If implemented, the idea might undermine many current business models in the software and digital content industries — while at the same time creating new ones. In other words, it's exactly the kind of revolutionary idea that has remade Silicon Valley at least four times since the 1960s."
Dynamic caching? (Score:5, Interesting)
So back in the day, we had a thing called the mbone [wikipedia.org], which was multicast infrastructure which was supposed to help with streaming live content from a single sender to many receivers. It was a bit ahead of its time, I think, streaming video just wasn't that common in the 1990s, and it also really only worked for actually-simultaneous streams, which, when streaming video did become common, wasn't what people were watching.
The contemporary solution is for big content providers to co-locate caches in telco data centers, so while you still send multiple separate streams of unsynchronized, high-demand streaming content, you send them a relatively short distance over relatively fat pipes, except for the last mile, which however only has to carry one copy. For low-demand streaming content, you don't need to cache, it's only a few copies, and the regular internet mostly works. It can fall over when a previously low-demand stream suddenly becomes high-demand, like Sunday night when NASA TV started to get slow, but it mostly works.
TFA (I know, I know...) doesn't address moving data around, but it seems like this is something that a new scheme could offer -- if the co-located caches were populated based purely on demand, rather than on demand plus ownership, then all content would be on the same footing, and it could lead to a better web experience for info consumers. That's a neat idea, but I think we already know how both the telcos and commercial streaming content owners feel about demand-based dynamic copy creation...
Re:Boring (Score:4, Interesting)
Two words: Dark fiber [wikipedia.org]. Laying absurd capacity of trunk line is no more expensive than burying an old copper wire bundle.
Not a new idea, or a useful one (Score:4, Interesting)
This has been proposed before. It's already obsolete.
The Uniform Resource Name [wikipedia.org] idea was supposed to do this. So was the "Semantic Web". In practice, there are many edge caching systems already, Akamai being the biggest provider. Most networking congestion problems today are at the edges, where they should be, not at the core. Bulk bandwidth is cheap.
The concept is obsolete because so much content is now "personalized". You can't cache a Facebook page or a Google search result. Every serve of the same URL produces different output. Video can be cached or multicast only if the source of the video doesn't object. Many video content sources would consider it a copyright violation. Especially if it breaks ad personalization.
As for running out of bandwidth, we're well on our way to enough capacity to stream HDTV to everybody on the planet simultaneously. Beyond that, it's hard to usefully use more bandwidth. Wireless spectrum space is a problem, but caching won't help there.
The sheer amount of infrastructure that's been deployed merely so that people can watch TV over the Internet is awe-inspiring. Arguably it could have been done more efficiently, but if it had been, it would have been worse. Various schemes were proposed by the cable TV industry over the last two decades, most of which were ways to do pay-per-view at lower cost to the cable company. With those schemes, the only content you could watch was sold by the cable company. We're lucky to have escaped that fate.
Re:Isn't the internet already meeting demand? (Score:4, Interesting)
the demands of each individual user aren't likely to increase much beyond that.
I think your thinking is way too constrained. If the bandwidth was available, then people could have immersive 3D working environments, and tele-commuting could be far more common. This would result in much less traffic on the roads and a huge reduction in CO2 emissions and oil imports. This is not science fiction. I have used Cisco's "Virtual Meeting Room" and it is pretty good.
You also need to think about things like "Siri", that send audio back to the server for processing, because there isn't enough horsepower in a cellphone. I could see "smart glasses" of the future sending video back to a server. That will require huge bandwidth.
If the bandwidth is available and affordable, the applications will come.