Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Chapter 21Content Replication and Delivery in Information-Centric Networks

Vasilis Sourlas¹, Paris Flegkas¹, Dimitrios Katsaros¹, and Leandros Tassiulas¹

¹University of Thessaly, Oktovriou, Volos, Greece

21.1 Introduction

Information-centric networking (ICN) is emerging as the main future networking environment, given that the vast majority of Internet activities are related to information access and delivery. In ICN, information is explicitly labeled so that anybody who has relevant information can potentially participate in the fulfillment of requests for said information. Publications are issued by clients (publishers) when they have a new information item to publish in the network, while subscriptions are issued by clients (subscribers) to subscribe the items they are interested in. Given the information-centric nature of the distribution utilizing information that is replicated across almost ubiquitously, available storage devices are an almost natural thought. Optimized dissemination of information within transient communication relationships of endpoints is the main promise of such efforts, and efficient replication of information is key to delivering on this promise.

While packet-level in-network opportunistic caching is one of the salient characteristics of ICN architectures, proper cache placement and replica assignment still have an important role to play. Content delivery network (CDN)-like replication distributes a site's content across multiple mirror servers. ...