An In-Network Service System Based on Smart Routers and Edge Devices

Watching and downloading of the online high-definition video has become one of our daily needs. The user experience of traditional service system based on content delivery network (CDN) and peer to peer (P2P) is limited by the bandwidth and the service ability. These technologies mostly concentrate on content servers and personal computers rather than routers and devices in the network. In this paper, we propose an in-network service system by taking full advantage of the smart routers and edge devices to relieve the load of CDN. We mainly do the following works. 1) We propose the basic architecture of the in-network service system and deploy it on a real network environment. 2) We introduce a hybrid node management algorithm for large scale, flexible, high churn network to manage the smart routers with the edge devices. 3) We design a file self-diffusion algorithm for content delivery. The evaluation shows the high performance of the hit rate of service using the proposed system. In the experiment, up to half of the user requests can be serviced by the proposed system without accessing the CDN.