A Data-Oriented Network Architecture For Content Delivery

Largely motivated by the increasing growth of multimedia content and the proliferation of content-centric applications in the Internet, the purpose of the network is no longer host-to-host communications, but the content delivery. CDN (Content Delivery Network) is an incremental content-delivery solution. CDN can alleviate user requirements for content partly. The basic idea of CDN is forwarding user request to the nearest proxy, and achieving load balancing through effective management mechanism. However, CDN is based on host-to-host communications, which leaves out the content attribute and fine-grained control on content. Moreover, CDN still has the limitations of IP network in terms of flexible forwarding, security, and data distribution.ICN (Information-Centric Networking) is a content-oriented and clean-slate architecture in future network domain. The rationale of ICN is to decouple content from its location by replacing host addresses with content names for content forwarding; ICN allows any network element to become a temporary content server for in-network caching, content requests can be intercepted and served by any element along the way to the hosting server if the content is cached locally. In addition, ICN promises several natural benefits. These include:lower response time via pervasive caching; intrinsic content integrity; simplified traffic engineering; and better support for mobility. ICN is able to adapt to the Internet of Things, massive data flow video, social network and many new mode of application. Unfortunately, these benefits come at a non-trivial cost. Many ICN proposals envision significant upgrades to the entire network infrastructure requiring all end hosts and network routers to support ICN as a first-order primitive. The current study of ICN is mostly concentrated in the routing protocol, data forwarding and cache mechanism. The related work in improving ICN compatible with existing IP network infrastructure needs more attention.In this paper, firstly, we design a hybrid hash-routing scheme that efficiently exploits in-network caching for trade-off between cache hit ratio and intra-domain link load. In addition, we argue that cache replacement strategy should complement each other with routing scheme and propose a novel cache policy named LH-FU (Least Hop-Frequently Used) to gain better cache hit ratio for our routing scheme. Then, we aim at the shortcomings of the IP network and content distribution technology and design a local ICN solution which is deployed on the existing IP network. We call it data-oriented network architecture for content delivery which is architecturally simpler than today’s CDNs and yet more incrementally deployable than clean-slate ICN designs.We evaluate the proposed hash-routing scheme using extensive simulations over real intra-domain topology and compare them against various caching mechanisms. We show firstly that hybrid hash-routing can gain great cache hits and at the same time decrease intra-domain link load in comparison to other caching mechanisms referred. Secondly, with some simple improvement such as LH-FU cache policy the cache hit ratio of our hash-routing scheme can be increased further. Finally, we analyzed the feasibility of the proposed architecture by deploying a simple system prototype.