Content Networks: Taxonomy and New Approaches

In this article we describe a taxonomy for content networks and suggest new architectures for such networks. In recent years, many types of content networks have been developed in various contexts, including peer-to-peer networks [8][12][16][27][31][37][49], cooperative Web caching [3][47], content distribution networks [2][7][10], subscribe-publish networks [6][52], and content-based sensor networks [14][21][22]. For each context, there have been numerous architectural approaches with various design objectives. Our taxonomy attempts to formulate a design space for both existing and future content networks and to identify design points of interest. The proposed new content networks, called semantic content-sensitive networks, offer desirable features such as support for content-proximity searches and the use of small routing tables.