Locality-aware peer-to-peer multimedia delivery over next-generation optical networks

The increasing success of multimedia services poses a serious challenge to both network operators and service providers. Traditional copper-based access technologies are being replaced by fiber-to-the-X (FTTX) deployments in order to meet this increasing bandwidth demand of individual users. However, the growing traffic volume in the access segment may overload the existing aggregation part of the network, therefore creating a bandwidth bottleneck in the core. To address this problem the traffic should be kept as much as possible in the access network, taking advantage of the high-capacity fiber infrastructure. Since multimedia traffic is dominating the network, locality-aware approaches to video content distribution can represent a good solution. In this work, we propose and evaluate a network-managed, peer-to-peer based caching scheme for multimedia distribution. Our results show that such a system is able to reduce core traffic compared to the traditional content delivery network (CDN) based strategies, while at the same time decreasing the overall power consumption of the network and offering cost-saving opportunities for operators.