ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Content Caching, Retrieval and Dissemination in Networks with Storage

The overwhelming use of today’s network is for an endpoint to acquire a named content file. As a result, efficient content discovery and dissemination are becoming one of the key challenges for the design of future Internet protocols. With significant advances in the technology areas of data storage, storage capacities have increased dramatically while the price has been dropping very fast. Thus it is valid to assume that each router on the Internet can cache content files that pass by and reply to content requests with its local copies. In this thesis, We firstly introduce the In-Network Caching framework. The content dissemination consists of two phases. The first phase is content discovery, which is the service provided by Content Name Resolution. Through CNRS a requester discovers the location(s) of the desired content files. We present the hybrid CNRS architecture, in which CNRS servers form a hierarchy, with national, regional, institutional CNRS servers from top to bottom. On each level, each CNRS server is responsible of monitoring the caching locations of a predesignated group of content files. While there is a miss at the lower level, the CNRS ii request will be forwarded to the higher level server, which is similar to the hierarchical we