Abstract

Most network naming schemes force applications to specify the network location of resources they wish to use. However, applications typically want a particular service and do not know where in the network the service is located. We argue that applications should be able to simply describe their needs in an intentional name, and that the network infrastructure should be able to resolve this name to its network locations. To this end, we have designed and implemented the Intentional Name System (INS). In this thesis we present the design of a key component of INS: the naming scheme. We describe the expressive syntax of its intentional names and the data structures and algorithms it uses to perform the name-to-location resolution. We analyze these algorithms, describe a prototype implementation, and present performance results that show the feasibility of our ideas. Finally, we describe three applications that demonstrate the utility of intentional names.

Citations