Content Distribution Framework Research Articles

StarFront: Cooperatively Constructing Pervasive and Low-Latency CDNs Upon Emerging LEO Satellites and Clouds

Internet content providers (ICPs) typically exploit content distribution networks (CDNs) to provide wide-area data access with high availability and low latency. However, our analysis on a large-scale trace collected from seven major CDN operators has revealed that: from a global perspective, there are still a large portion of users suffering from high user-perceived latency due to the insufficient deployment of terrestrial cloud infrastructures, especially in remote or rural areas where even the closest available cache server is too far away. This paper presents, a cost-effective content distribution framework to optimize global CDNs and enable low content access latency anywhere. collaboratively builds CDNs upon emerging low earth orbit (LEO) constellations and existing cloud platforms to satisfy the low latency requirements while minimizing the operational cost. Specifically, exploits a key insight that emerging mega-constellations will consist of thousands of LEO satellites which can be equipped with high-speed data links and storage, and thus can potentially work as “cache in space” to enable pervasive and low-latency data access. judiciously places replicas on either LEO satellite caches or terrestrial cloud caches, and dynamically assigns user requests to proper cache servers based on different constellation parameters, cloud/user distributions and pricing policies. We have implemented a prototype in our testbed, and extensive trace-driven evaluations covering multiple geo-distributed vantage points have demonstrated that can effectively reduce the global content access latency with acceptable operational cost under representative CDN traffic.

Privacy preserving content distribution framework for multidistributor DRM systems

AbstractGrowing network technology and computing facilities present greater opportunities for the e‐commerce industry to sell digital content on an easily assessable platform. However, digital content creators need help due to digital content easily copying and redistributing without quality degradation. Digital rights management (DRM) systems are built up to deal with content piracy and effective distribution. However, traditional two‐party DRM systems are client–server architecture, which may create a bottleneck situation for large networks. At the same time, a multidistributor DRM (MD‐DRM) system can offer content distribution more effectively. However, as the number of distributors increases, chances of security and privacy vulnerability may increase. Thus, a MD‐DRM system requires with an effective mechanism of privacy‐preserving and secure content distribution. We proposed a privacy‐preserving and authorized content distribution framework that remains compatible with multiple distributors and single‐distributor architecture to achieve basic security attributes. Besides, the proposed scheme does not breach the key parameters of accountability. This mechanism makes traitor identification possible without violating the privacy rights of authorized consumers in multidistributor architecture.

A provably secure content distribution framework for portable DRM systems

The growing demand for digital content using smart devices has taken the attenuation towards the enforcement of rights in digital content distribution. Digital rights management (DRM) systems support copyrights and try to control the access of digital content in a user-friendly way. However, user-friendly systems should also support user’s rights along with system requirements. The portable DRM architecture has the potential to support user’s rights. One of the critical challenges in portable DRM systems is the anonymous and secure delivery of digital content. To address this issue, a smart card-based content distribution framework is presented, which supports mutual authentication and secure session establishment. The security proof of the proposed scheme is presented in a random oracle model with rigorous informal security analysis, which signals that the proposed scheme has desirable attributes of security. Moreover, the security analysis is also performed using a widely adopted simulation tool, namely, “Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocol and Application (AVISPA)”. The study of performance has been conducted, which signals that the proposed scheme is also addressing the requirements of efficiency.

An authenticated access control framework for digital right management system

With the growing development in digital content distribution, researchers focus on the construction of an access right enabled digital content distribution framework for the legal user. Digital rights management (DRM) is the system which tries to ensure authorized content distribution. Current, DRM systems either provide authentication or constrain access right, but access control with legal authentication in the digital content distribution has remained a challenging issue for public-key cryptography (PKC) or identity-based public-key cryptography (ID-PKC). PKC associates certificate management, which includes revocation, storage, distribution and verification of certificates. As a result, certificate authority becomes the bottleneck in a large network. On the other hand, ID-PKC has the drawback of key escrow. For secure and authorized content distribution, evacuation from these problems is needed. In this paper, we present an authenticated access control protocol, which maintains user’s right with authorized content distribution for the digital right management system. Its security has been proved in the random oracle model. An analysis of performance shows enhancement in efficiency, which indicates that the proposed scheme presents a secure and authorized access control mechanisms for resource-constrained devices.

Cryptanalysis and improvement of biometric based content distribution framework for digital rights management systems

AbstractDigital contents are utilized and transmitted over the public network. Thus, the evolution of an emphatic mechanism to ensure authorized access to digital content is the topmost priority of the multimedia industry. Digital right management (DRM) is a tool that aims to ensure authorized access multimedia content to the right holders. However, over the years, several other challenges associated with DRM systems have also emerged such as efficient computation, user privacy, the security of existing protocols. For the scalable distribute digital content, an efficient, secure and authorized content distribution protocol is required. This paper proposed a biometric‐based content technique for a DRM system, which enables to deliver content key among mutually authentic entities. The security of the proposed protocol has been proved under the widely recognized random oracle model, which indicates that the proposed protocol is provably secure under probabilistic polynomial time adversary. The proposed scheme achieves anonymity and unlinkability. Moreover, comparative analysis shows that the proposed scheme address efficiency along with security.

An Efficient Delay Tolerant Networks Routing Protocol for Information-Centric Networking

Delay tolerant networks (DTN) is a good candidate for delivering information-centric networking (ICN) messages in fragmented networks due to disaster. In order to efficiently deliver ICN messages in DTN, the characteristics of multiple requester nodes for the same content and multiple provider nodes for the same request should be used efficiently. In this paper, we propose an efficient DTN routing protocol for ICN. In the proposed protocol, requester information for request packet, which is called an Interest in ICN, is shared by exchanging status table with requested Data ID, requester ID, and satisfaction flag, where satisfaction flag is defined to show the delivery status of Data, so that unnecessary forwarding of Data is avoided. Data is forwarded to a more probable node by comparing average delivery predictability to a set of requesters. Performance of the proposed protocol was evaluated using simulation from the aspect of Data delivery probability and Data overhead, for varying buffer sizes, number of relay nodes, and time-to-live (TTL) of Data. The results show that the proposed protocol has better Data delivery probability, compared to content distribution and retrieval framework in disaster networks for public protection (CIDOR) and opportunistic forwarding (OF) protocols, although there is a tradeoff from the aspect of Data overhead for varying buffer sizes and number of relay nodes.

Chaos-Based Content Distribution Framework for Digital Rights Management System

Multimedia contents are digitally utilized these days. Thus, the development of an effective method to access the content is becoming the topmost priority of the entertainment industry to protect the digital content from unauthorized access. Digital rights management (DRM) systems are the technique that makes digital content accessible only to the legal rights holders. As the Internet of Things environment is used in the distribution and access of digital content, a secure and efficient content delivery mechanism is also required. Keeping the focus on these points, this article proposes a content distribution framework for DRM system using chaotic map. Formal security verification under the random oracle model, which uncovers the proposed protocol's capability to resist the critical attacks is given. Moreover, simulation study for security verification is performed using the broadly accepted “automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications,” which indicates that the protocol is safe. Moreover, the detailed comparative study with related protocols demonstrates that it provides better security and improves the computational and communication efficiency.

Authenticated content distribution framework for digital rights management systems with smart card revocation

SummaryThe growing features of multimedia distribution across multiple smart devices have attained significant attention of many industries and users. In this context, digital rights management (DRM) is the system, which tries to ensure authorized content distribution. For much diverse and productive research in content distribution, DRM is paying attention to provide a better DRM protocol according to current requirements. But the violation of copyright protection of digital content (video, audio, and secret documents) still has a significant issue of concern. Not only solely copyright protection but also stolen smart cards which keep the license and more specific information of a user is also an attentive concern of DRM users. In this paper, we introduced an authenticated key agreement protocol which maintains secure and authorized content distribution with successful smart card revocation. Moreover, the proposed scheme has simulated under AVISPA tool, which informally confirms the security of the protocol. The formal proof security is given in the random oracle model and then done the performance evaluation. The comparison with the relevant existing schemes shows the advantage of the proposed scheme. It identified that the proposed protocol achieves all the desirable security and performance attributes with valid smart card revocation.

Implementation of Network-Coded Cooperation for Energy Efficient Content Distribution in 5G Mobile Small Cells

The continuous increase of mobile data traffic calls for the design of energy-efficient content distribution mechanisms, to be incorporated in the fifth generation of mobile networks, 5G. One of the biggest concerns of the companies and the research community is to reduce the energy consumption in both the user equipments (UEs) and the network equipment. In this article, we present a novel content distribution framework called Network-Coded Cooperative (NCC) Networks, which benefits from the interplay between mobile clouds (MC) and Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) to reduce the overall energy consumption in the devices that take part in the communication. This novel framework leads to reduced energy consumption by offloading the cellular interface to a link with greater energy efficiency, for instance, WiFi, within the mobile small cell. We evaluate the performance of our framework analytically and in practical implementation (i.e., testbed) in terms of throughput, energy savings, packet decoding ratio, latency, and synchronicity. In comparison to the conventional content distribution system, for the case of four users, the analytical model and the testbed implementation show energy savings of more than 12% and 8%, respectively. Furthermore, network usage is reduced, losses are neutralized, and the content is synchronously distributed to all users.

Content Caching and Distribution in Smart Grid Enabled Wireless Networks

To facilitate wireless transmission of multimedia content to mobile users, we propose a content caching and distribution framework for smart grid enabled OFDM networks, where each popular multimedia file is coded and distributively stored in multiple energy harvesting enabled serving nodes (SNs), and the green energy distributively harvested by SNs can be shared with each other through the smart grid. The distributive caching, green energy sharing and the on-grid energy backup have improved the reliability and performance of the wireless multimedia downloading process. To minimize the total on-grid power consumption of the whole network, while guaranteeing that each user can retrieve the whole content, the user association scheme is jointly designed with consideration of resource allocation, including subchannel assignment, power allocation and power flow among nodes, where the user association scheme decides which SN serves which user. First, the optimal power allocated to each subchannel and the power flows among nodes are derived analytically. Then, the user association problem is decoupled from the subchannel assignment problem, and the proposed user association scheme has leveraged the multicasting nature of the content download process. To decide which subchannel is assigned to which node, the number of subchannels assigned to each node is first determined, according to the green energy generating rate and the associated traffic offload, and then the corresponding subchannels are selected from the total assigned system spectrum. Simulation results demonstrate that bringing content, green energy and serving node closer to the end user can notably reduce the on-grid energy consumption.

ChainCluster: Engineering a Cooperative Content Distribution Framework for Highway Vehicular Communications

The recent advances in wireless communication techniques have made it possible for fast-moving vehicles to download data from the roadside communications infrastructure [e.g., IEEE 802.11b Access Point (AP)], namely, Drive-thru Internet. However, due to the high mobility, harsh, and intermittent wireless channels, the data download volume of individual vehicle per drive-thru is quite limited, as observed in real-world tests. This would severely restrict the service quality of upper layer applications, such as file download and video streaming. On addressing this issue, in this paper, we propose ChainCluster, a cooperative Drive-thru Internet scheme. ChainCluster selects appropriate vehicles to form a linear cluster on the highway. The cluster members then cooperatively download the same content file, with each member retrieving one portion of the file, from the roadside infrastructure. With cluster members consecutively driving through the roadside infrastructure, the download of a single vehicle is virtually extended to that of a tandem of vehicles, which accordingly enhances the probability of successful file download significantly. With a delicate linear cluster formation scheme proposed and applied, in this paper, we first develop an analytical framework to evaluate the data volume that can be downloaded using cooperative drive-thru. Using simulations, we then verify the performance of ChainCluster and show that our analysis can match the simulations well. Finally, we show that ChainCluster can outperform the typical studied clustering schemes and provide general guidance for cooperative content distribution in highway vehicular communications.

A privacy enabling content distribution framework for digital rights management

Digital rights management (DRM) technology has been employed to prevent illegal content consumption/redistribution. However, to achieve secure and authorised content distribution, DRM systems lose flexibility and create a serious threat to privacy. Additionally, traditional DRM models are two level distribution systems, which do not facilitate scalable content distribution. In this paper, we will propose a new content distribution framework for multiparty multilevel DRM system by employing the facility location technique. In it, authentication and payment is handled by the distributor while license server generates the license. This alleviates the license server workload and provides the opportunity to the distributor to create offers, promotions and discounts to promote the content. The adoption of independent payment collection and license generation authorities provides the way to monitor the correctness of content sell. Furthermore, the use of ring signature and pseudonym token in content distribution, protect users’ privacy without violating accountability parameters.

An Optimized Content Replication and Distribution Framework for Vehicular Networks

Future road vehicles are expected to support point-to-point and long-range wireless connectivity as a standard feature, allowing data transfers while moving. In this vein, it is possible to forecast and develop new communication paradigms, as well as new infrastructures to take advantage of peculiarities of vehicular networks. This article introduces an optimized framework, on the basis of peer-to-peer principles, to manage content replication and dissemination through a mobile vehicular network. This is obtained through a discrete-time dynamic system over which an optimization problem must be solved in real time. Such a solution enables two different operations: (a) to overcome bandwidth limitations for distributing information among vehicles (e.g., traffic or security bulletins and multimedia contents) in an efficient way; (b) to use the vehicular flow as a virtual backbone to deliver data to different spatial locations without the need of a fixed network infrastructure. Simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, with respect to classic peer-to-peer distribution schemes directly “ported” over the vehicular network. A direct comparison with an infrastructure-oriented solution is also presented.

A novel DRM framework for peer-to-peer music content delivery

Due to rapid advances in the network communications field in recent years, the distribution of large-scale music contents has become easier and more efficient than ever before. However, the unauthorized distribution of copyright-protected content has emerged as a major concern. Accordingly, this paper presents a content distribution framework with a DRM capability for P2P networks. The robustness of the content distribution is ensured by using a network coding approach based on the Lagrange polynomial interpolation method. When the downloading peer within the network receives sufficient coded pieces, it not only reconstructs the associated blocks using a finite field Gaussian elimination method, but also creates its own copies of the coded pieces within these blocks and shares these copies amongst the other peers in the network. As a result, the distribution overhead imposed on the music provider is substantially reduced and the number of coded pieces within the network is significantly increased, thereby overcoming the “last piece problem” inherent in existing P2P schemes. In the DRM module of the framework, the RSA public-key cryptosystem is used to generate a unique digital fingerprint for every user within the network. The fingerprint is embedded within the music file in a protected form such that the music provider can establish the identification of any user performing an unauthorized distribution of the file. The experimental results confirm that the proposed framework provides an efficient and secure means of distributing large-scale copyright-protected music contents with no discernible degradation in the audio quality.