A Layered Naming Architecture for the Internet

Hari Balakrishnan, Karthik Lakshminarayanan, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, Michael Walfish
ACM SIGCOMM 2004, Portland, OR, September 2004

Currently the Internet has only one level of name resolution, DNS, which converts user-level domain names into IP addresses. In this paper we borrow liberally from the literature to argue that there should be three levels of name resolution: from user-level descriptors to service identifiers; from service identifiers to endpoint identifiers; and from endpoint identifiers to IP addresses. These additional levels of naming and resolution (1) allow services and data to be first class Internet objects (in that they can be directly and persistently named), (2) seamlessly accommodate mobility and multi-homing and (3) integrate middleboxes (such as NATs and firewalls) into the Internet architecture. We further argue that flat names are a natural choice for the service and endpoint identifiers. Hence, this architecture requires scalable resolution of flat names, a capability that distributed hash tables (DHTs) can provide.

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Bibtex Entry:

@inproceedings{balakrishnan2004layered,
   author =       "Hari Balakrishnan and Karthik Lakshminarayanan and Sylvia Ratnasamy and Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica and Michael Walfish",
   title =        "{A Layered Naming Architecture for the Internet}",
   booktitle =    {ACM SIGCOMM 2004},
   year =         {2004},
   month =        {September},
   address =      {Portland, OR}
}