A Framework for Integrating Content Characteristics into the Future Internet Architecture

Content characteristics such as content size can bring significant benefits for both network management and improving quality of experience. However, the current Internet architecture does not have a direct mechanism to know content characteristics. In this article, we argue that it is necessary to integrate content characteristics into the future Internet architecture. We present the design challenges, propose a framework for implementation, and build a prototype to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework. To show the benefits of integrating content characteristics into the Internet architecture, we also present numerical results obtained from running experiments on the prototype by using real data traces.