Content aware networking in the Internet: issues and challenges

Content aware networking is a new paradigm in which the network is intelligent to understand the type of content request, where to find it, and how to deliver it in an efficient way. We discuss, why the existing IP-smart paradigm does not meet the needs of today's content rich Internet. We describe content aware networking issues that include content storage across distributed servers, content based routing, content delivery, content distribution and content based resource reservation. Content delivery is often associated with multicast and we present various multicast techniques by which a content can be delivered efficiently. The emerging end-to-end IP security (IPSec) poses some unique challenge to this trend and we present few solutions to overcome the problem.