Wide-area content-based routing mechanism

Content networking is an emerging technology, where the requests for content are steered by content routers that examine not only the destinations but also content descriptors such as URL and cookies. In the current deployments of content networking, content routing is mostly confined to selecting the most appropriate back-end server in virtualized Web server clusters. In this paper, we present an architecture for wide-area content routing. The architecture is based on tagging the requests at ingress points. The tags are designed to incorporate several different attributes of the content in the routing process. Simulations are carried out to compare the performance of the proposed scheme with a DNS-based content access scheme.