Content centric networking

In contrast to IP-based, host-oriented, Internet architecture, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) emphasizes content by making it directly addressable and routable. Endpoints communicate based on named data instead of IP addresses. CCN is characterized by the basic exchange of content request messages (called "Interests") and content return messages (called "Content Objects"). It is considered an information-centric networking (ICN) architecture.

The goals of CCN are to provide a more secure, flexible, and scalable network, thereby addressing the Internet's modern-day requirements for protected content distribution on a massive scale to a diverse set of end devices. CCN embodies a security model that explicitly secures individual pieces of content rather than securing the connection or "pipe." It provides additional flexibility using data names instead of host names (IP addresses). Additionally, named and secured content resides in distributed caches automatically populated on demand or selectively pre-populated. When requested by name, CCN delivers named content to the user from the nearest cache, traversing fewer network hops, eliminating redundant requests, and consuming fewer resources overall. CCN began as a research project at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 2007. The first software release (CCNx 0.1) was made available in 2009. CCN is the ancestor of related approaches, including named data networking. CCN technology and its open-source code base were acquired by Cisco in February 2017.