A Generic and Programmable Name Resolution System in Future Internet Architectures

As one of the cornerstones of networked systems, the design of resolution between names and resources, that is, name resolution, is crucial. In recent years, with the emerging research on future Internet architectures, many namespaces and resolution systems have been proposed. However, these namespaces and resolution systems are closed systems, where a system can only support one or more predefined namespaces and the policies for resolution among them. Such closed design lacks the flexibility of defining new resolution policy and interoperability among different networked systems. In this article, we analyze the existing namespaces and resolution systems in various network architectures and propose a generic name resolution framework, which can allow flexible namespace and resolution policy definition and enable interoperation among different network architectures. A prototype of such a name resolution system supporting the interoperability among WiFi, Zigbee, and Bluetooth, and the interoperability between NDN and HTTP is demonstrated.