On adapting HTTP protocol to content centric networking

Abstract

Designed around host-reachability, today's Internet architecture faces many limitations while serving content-oriented applications which generate most traffic load to the Internet. CCN (Content Centric Networking) [1] is one of the most important proposals for future Internet architecture, which aims to build a content/data oriented network to solve these limitations. On the other hand, HTTP is the most important protocol to deploy new services and applications on current TCP/IP-based Internet. In this paper, we attempt to run HTTP protocol on CCN and combine the two by stitching them semantically on their content-oriented features, such as content caching. We expect that this combination can be leveraged to build CCN testbed with real HTTP traffic which is vital to validation and redesigning of specific mechanisms of CCN and to finding a transition way of CCN in which great incentive is provided for service providers in the economic ecosystem of content distribution. We designed and implemented a HTTP-CCN gateway to transform HTTP request and HTTP response into CCN Interest and Data respectively. We illustrate how to semantically map HTTP caching to CCN caching, which is one of the most attractive properties of CCN. We also discuss how to achieve transparent caching with CCN and find out that it is nontrivial to achieve complete transparency of caching with CCN given no cooperation with CDNs and content providers.