A tentative comparison on CDN and NDN

Abstract

With the pretty prompt growth in Internet content, future Internet is emerging as the main usage shifting from traditional host-to-host model to content dissemination model, e.g. video makes up more than half of Internet traffic. ISPs, content providers and other third parties have widely deployed content delivery networks (CDNs) to support digital content distribution. Though CDN is an ad-hoc solution to the content dissemination problem, there are still big challenges, such as complicated control plane. By contrast, as a wholly new designed network architecture, named data networking (NDN) incorporates content delivery function in its network layer, its stateful routing and forwarding plane can effectively detect and adapt to the dynamic and ever-changing Internet. In this paper, we try to explore the similarities and differences between CDN and NDN. Hence, we evaluate the distribution efficiency, network security and protocol overhead between CDN and NDN. Especially in the implementation phase, we conduct their testbeds separately with the same topology to derive their performance of content delivery. Finally, summarizing our main results, we gather that: 1) NDN has its own advantage on lots of aspects, including security, scalability and quality of service (QoS); 2) NDN make full use of surrounding resources and is more adaptive to the dynamic and ever-changing Internet; 3) though CDN is a commercial and mature architecture, in some scenarios, NDN can perform better than CDN under the same topology and caching storage. In a word, NDN is practical to play an even greater role in the evolution of the Internet based on the massive distribution and retrieval in the future. Keywords—architecture; content delivery network; named data networking; comparison; evaluation