Data-Oriented And Conection-Oriended Networking

16 Pages 3953 Words

Data-oriented networking


ABSTRACT

Differentiates between connection-oriented and data-oriented
networking, identifies the advantages of data-oriented networks,
argues that Internet web architecture is becoming more
data-oriented, and suggests ways of encouraging and accelerating
this trend.



Contemporary Internet architecture is heavily connection-oriented. IP
underlies almost all Internet operations, and its fundamental
operation is to deliver a data packet to an endpoint. TCP uses IP to
sequence streams of data packets to those endpoints; higher-level
services, such as HTTP, are built using TCP. All of these operations
are based upon the underlying IP addresses, which identify specific
machines and devices. Even UDP operations are connection-oriented in
the sense that UDP addresses identify a specific machine on the
Internet with which a connection (even just a single packet) must be
established. Note that I use the term connection-oriented in a
somewhat different sense than the traditional distinction between
connection-oriented and connection less protocols.

More recently, Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) have emerged as the
dominant means for users to identify web resources. The distinction
is not merely one of introducing a new protocol with new terminology,
either. URLs are used to name blocks of data, not network devices.
Especially with the advent of caching, it's now clear that a web
browser may not have to make any network connections at all in order
to retrieve and display a web page. "Retrieving" a URL differs
significantly from opening an HTTP session, since an HTTP session
implies a network connection to a named device, while accessing a URL
implies only that its associated data (stored, perhaps, on a local
disk) is made available. HTTP, SMTP, ssh, and other TCP-based
protocols are inherently connection-oriented, while the URL is
inherently data...