There is some research going on in Information Centric Networking and Named Data Networking. The basic idea is switching to a system based on content instead of

There is some research going on in Information Centric Networking and Named Data Networking. The basic idea is switching to a system based on content instead of hosts. The proposed solutions try to reduce traffic overhead (like replication and caching of content on switches and routers), provide better indexing and search functionalities etc. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-centric_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-centric_networking