Extending Named Data Networking With Support For Names With Range Indications

Within Information-Centric Networking (ICN) data is divided into chunks, each of which is given a unique and hierarchical name. This concept allows applications to ask the network for a given Named Data Object (NDO), without knowledge of its location.Current ICN implementations support matching hierarchical names in Interest messages to NDOs via exact or longest prefix matching. This poses challenges with regards to naming in certain situations, when the application does not know the name of a specific object, or is not interested in one specific object but rather in an instance of "similar" objects. An example is retrieving sensor data from a geographical area covered by multiple sensors.To address the issue, we introduce the concept of a name with range indications in the Interest, in order to ask for an object whose name is contained in the indicated range. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by extending the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture with a support for handling Interest messages with range indications.