Exploiting ICN for Efficient Content Dissemination in CDNs

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) has become an important element in the Internet, which uses application-layer 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, multi-cast and in-network caching. While these in-network caches can help improve the content delivery performance, they are unaware of application-specific 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 Mobility-First - 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 application-layer 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.