The Network is a Database
by: Serge Fdida, University P & M Curie - LIP6/CNRS, Paris, France

Abstract:
The primary use of the Internet is content distribution - the delivery of web
pages, audio, and video to client applications - yet the Internet wa
Another advantage of a data-centric approach is that the transmission of
information is controlled by the receiver or set of receivers, reducing Denial
of Service Attacks and providing a stronger control over the huge amount of
data flowing in the network. Moreover, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) will
become a standard in networking nodes for various reasons including
interception or traffic management, allowing forwarding packets based on
parameters above layer 4.

We argue that the PubSub type of service model becoming predominant, it will
be beneficial to move down the layers to the networking stack.

A content-based network is a communication network that features a new
advanced communication model where messages are not given explicit destination
addresses, and where the destinations of a message are determined by matching
the content of the message against selection predicates declared by
nodes. Content-based communication is a communication service whereby the flow
of messages from senders to receivers is driven by the content of the
messages, rather than by explicit addresses assigned by senders and attached
to the messages. Using a content-based communication service, receivers
declare their interests by means of selection predicates, while senders simply
publish messages. The service consists of delivering to any and all receivers
each message that matches the selection predicates declared by those
receivers. In the content-based service model, message content is structured
as a set of attribute/value pairs, and a selection predicate is a logical
disjunction of conjunctions of elementary constraints over the values of
individual attributes. Moreover, routing and service discovery are now tightly
coupled.

The duality between storage and transmission always existed in networking,
depending on the cost for moving information, initiating various models over
time such as client-server, Push, P2P or PubSub. Regarding the huge volume of
information carried by today's networks and the evolution of service models,
the network can be seen as a database where customers put request with
attributes to select information according to their interest. This approach
will trigger numerous design issues related to naming, addressing, routing,
service discovery, access control, multicast, filtering, classification of
packets, scalability... It also has the potential to enforce security, support
communities or generate new routing technologies.