Performance Comparison of Content-oriented Networking Alternatives: A Hierarchical Tree versus A Flat Distributed Hash Table

The internet was designed with host-oriented networking applications such as file transfer and remote login. However, recent internet statistics show that content-oriented traffic (e.g. web pages, multimedia clips) becomes more and more dominant. Even though content-oriented networking has received increasing attention, there have been few comprehensive and quantitative studies on how to realize a content-oriented networking framework. In this paper, we focus on the operational issues of the new networking framework: (i) how to locate contents, (ii) how to deliver contents, and (iii) how to cache contents. There are two major infrastructure alternatives in substantiating these mechanisms: a tree and a distributed hash table (DHT). We carry out comprehensive simulation experiments to compare these alternatives in terms of content transfer latency, cache effectiveness, and failure resilience.