Abstract
Names make it easier to identify and refer to people and things around us. Restaurants in a city, postal mailboxes on a street, digital files on a computer, and physical interfaces on a router are examples of things we assign contextual names to. Computer networks are no different. We use names so we can identify, share, and locate objects on a network. Networks host objects, including for example nodes, endpoints, services, content, and users. A computer network is essentially intended for delivering and sharing information. The basic primitive needed for successful delivery of information is the ability to discover routes to objects. So in essence, the two most basic abstractions in a computer network are objects and routes. This in a sense defines the purpose of naming in the context of computer networks: to make it easier to discover routes to objects. Almost every networking application relies on naming services, the latter being an integral part of a network architecture. Revisiting the definitions of Shoch, Hauzeur, Saltzer and Karsten, we start by disambiguating the plethora of terms used in the naming literature—name, address, identifier, locator, binding, routing, discovery, mapping, and resolution. We present the definitions and we provide a formalism based on simple relational algebra. The model adds clarity to the discussion by formally representing the main abstractions, their relationships, and the main constraints on them. Such a formalism may be directly fed into symbolic model checkers to explore and check a variety of system level properties. We then examine the properties of names, bindings, and discovery, and we give two illustrative case studies of name services.
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- 1.
The last k attributes of the first relation must equal the first k attributes of the second in order for the rows to survive the join.
- 2.
Discovery/Routing additionally includes the distributed control mechanisms needed to construct and maintain the forwarding tables.
- 3.
By definition of F, an object \(o \notin\mathcal{S}\) such that (s,n,o,n′)∈F must be terminal.
- 4.
For example using a provider-independent address that is de-aggregated and that each node in the DFZ has a record for it in its forwarding table.
- 5.
The nslookup utility on windows or unix systems is a DNS resolver.
- 6.
UNM could delegate the management of its namespace to some third-party instead, but it is still the authority of the subtree.
- 7.
As long as the DNS protocol is trusted to behave correctly.
- 8.
Other models exist where the key-value pairs correspond to the name-object pairs and the lookup provides some overlay forwarding mechanism to the objects.
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Khoury, J.S., Abdallah, C.T. (2013). Naming. In: Internet Naming and Discovery. Signals and Communication Technology. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4552-3_3
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