Exploiting ICN for Efficient Content Dissemination in CDNs

Abstract

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) has become an important element in the Internet, which uses applicationlayer caches to improve user experience and reduce network/server load. However, CDNs face efficiency issues due to the following two reasons: 1) they are not aware of the network status, and 2) the underlying location-centric network (IP) does not understand content. At the same time, the Information-Centric Network (ICN) has been developed to address these issues: they use content identities as routing labels and support functions such as multi-source, multicast and in-network caching. While these in-network caches can help improve the content delivery performance, they are unaware of applicationspecific characteristics like policy and popularity. As a result, we believe application-layer CDN solutions are still beneficial in ICN. They can take advantage of ICN content delivery capabilities while having access to application-level details, therefore getting the best from both worlds. In this paper, we propose a CDN architecture over MobilityFirst – a representative example of ICN – to show the benefit of such a design. The solution uses self-certifying names that can enable efficient content validation in CDNs, an applicationlayer CDN design that can maximize the utility of caches, and a pushing mechanism that allows content providers cache content proactively. Through a prototype, we show the feasibility and efficiency of the architecture.