What's in a Name?: Naming Big Science Data in Named Data Networking

Abstract

Data naming is the most critical construct of Named Data Networking (NDN). The way a piece of content is named has profound impacts on content discovery, routing of user requests, data retrieval, and security. Besides, the naming of individual pieces of content seriously affects how the network behaves. While names are ubiquitous in NDN, the design choices for content names and how they affect the network have largely been overlooked. NDN applications and protocols usually name content to fit their particular application scenarios, often derived from existing naming conventions. However, these ad-hoc naming schemes often ignore the impact of these names on the network and the applications themselves. Drawing upon our experience in applying NDN to multiple science domains, we point out different exiting naming schemes in scientific communities, how we translated these names into NDN names, and the effect of naming on the network. Based on these observations, we provide a set of naming guidelines for future scientific applications and network operators supporting those applications.