Towards Content-Location Awareness

"Finding and streaming content and services in an efficient, timely and networked friendly way"

Towards Future Internet age, the COAST project aims to build a Future Content-Centric Network (FCN) overlay architecture able to intelligently and efficiently link billions of content sources to billions of content consumers, and offer fast content-aware retrieval, delivery and streaming, while meeting network-wide Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in content and services consumption.

Within COAST, a Future Content Network (FCN) is defined as a network, based on the content-oriented paradigm. In conjunction to the client-server paradigm, the content-oriented paradigm focuses not only on the communication party, but also on the delivered data themselves.  In short, COAST is expected to deliver a FCN overlay architecture, where the users will just specify which data they need, and the COAST framework will find the desired data and forward it to the users efficiently, achieving network-wide SLAs in content consumption.

One of the key enablers of COAST is to allow for incremental deployment of intelligent services into the network. COAST will progressively move intelligence in the network by implementing new networking nodes (edge routers, home gateways, terminal devices), with visibility into the type of data that they are carrying or caching. This content-level information can then be used by the routers to make more intelligent retrieval, routing and data handling decisions. Unlike other approaches, COAST relies on distributed “on-line” searching of published content (digital objects, streams and services) and “on-the fly” extracting information of the flowing streams, leaving the actual decision making to the routers. In a second step, COAST provides for content adaptation and optimal distribution over the Future Media Internet.

COAST is a STREP research project within the European Research Programme 7 and it is partially funded by the European Commission under contract ICT-248036

* The logo is based on the painting “Birds Eye View of Sea Coast” by Leonardo Da Vinci

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