Information-centric networking (ICN), also referred as to content-centric networking, content-oriented networking, data-oriented networking or named data networking, is a new paradigm for the future Internet architecture, which addresses the existing IP networks' limitations in supporting content distribution and information access. At its core, ICN decouples content from hosts and enables the ability to retrieve a content object by its name (identifier), rather than its storage location (IP address). In information-centric networks, names are used to identify content objects as opposed to IP addresses. The content objects may be stored or cached at multiple locations.

Name resolution and routing is critical for content retrieval in ICN networks. In this dissertation, we first perform a comparative study of two popular classes of ICN name resolution and routing schemes, flooding and distributed hash table (DHT) through extensive simulations. The evaluation results show that the performance of these two approaches are reliant on several factors including network size, content location dynamics, and content popularity. Our study reveals insights into design tradeoffs and offers guidelines for design strategies. In particular, it illustrates the need to develop a hybrid approach to obtain better system performance.

This dissertation then proposes a new hybrid name-based routing framework and designs a new hybrid algorithm called Access Router Coordinated Routing algorithm, which combines the advantages of both DHT and flooding schemes. The proposed algorithm achieves significantly performance gains compared to the existing techniques, especially when it deals with the control overhead costs and network latency. Additionally, multi-objective decision-making methodology has been employed to investigate the tradeoffs of overhead and latency. A new equation has been developed to help network administrators plan and design the networks based on their priorities.