An open content delivery infrastructure using data lockers

Abstract

Content distribution has become a major function of the Internet. However, the current Internet content distribution infrastructure is largely closed to end-to-end applications, making it challenging for the application community to utilize in-network storage resources. In this paper, we investigate a simple paradigm named SAILOR that introduces application-definable, shared in-network data lockers to effectively facilitate the construction of highly efficient, cooperative content distribution applications. We design and implement a prototype of SAILOR and integrate it with two popular content distribution applications for file and live streaming respectively. Our experimental results clearly demonstrate that SAILOR can significantly improve both network efficiency and application performance, thereby benefiting both network providers and application providers.