Abstract— We design a scalable and expressive naming system called SENS, which can retrieve information of computing and content resources distributed widely on the Internet by exact queries and multi-attribute range queries over resource names. Our system utilizes a descriptive naming scheme to name resources and a multi-dimensional resource ID space for message routing through the overlay network of name servers (NSs). The resource ID space is constructed on the overlay network based on CAN routing algorithm. We propose a novel mapping scheme between resource names and resource IDs, which can preserve the locality of resource IDs while still achieving a good degree of load balancing regarding resource information distribution. We also propose a multicast routing algorithm to deliver resource information and a broadcast routing algorithm to route query messages to corresponding NSs at minimum cost. Our simulation results show that our system can achieve good routing performance and ...