MultiCache: An Incrementally Deployable Overlay Architecture for Information-Centric Networking

It has been long realized that the Internet is evolving from a network connecting pairs of end hosts to a substrate for information dissemination. While this shift towards information centric networking has been clearly demonstrated by the proliferation of file sharing (e.g., BitTorrent) and content delivery (e.g., YouTube) applications, it has not been followed by a corresponding shift in network architecture. As a result, even though such applications are attractive to both content providers, due to their lower bandwidth requirements, and to end users, due to their reduced download times, they plague the underlying network with redundant packet transmissions, a significant part of which takes place over costly inter-domain links. In essence, the end-to-end nature of the current Internet architecture prevents network operators from controlling the traffic carried by their networks, delegating such control to end users and their applications. In this paper, we propose MultiCache, an information centric architecture aiming at the efficient use of network resources that is based on two primitives: multicast and caching. To this end, we revisit overlay multicast as a means for content delivery, and take advantage of multicast forwarding information to locate, in an anycast fashion, nearby caches that have been themselves fed by multicast sessions. Our architecture is evaluated against a widespread file sharing application (BitTorrent) with respect to both network resource savings and end user experience.