A Hybrid Overlay Multicast and Caching Scheme for Information-Centric Networking

It has long been realized that the use of the Internet has moved away from its original end-host centric model. The vast majority of services and applications is nowadays focused on information itself rather on the end-points providing/consuming it. However, the underlying network architecture still focuses on enabling the communication between pairs of end-hosts, leading to a series of problems, such as the inefficient utilization of network resources, demonstrated by the proliferation of peer-to-peer (P2P) and file sharing applications. In essence, the prevailing end-to-end nature of the current Internet architecture prohibits network operators from controlling the traffic carried by their networks, leaving this control entirely to end users and their applications. In this paper, we investigate the potential benefits of MultiCache, an overlay network architecture aiming at handing control back to network operators. In MultiCache proxy overlay routers enable the delivery of data either via direct multicast, or via multicast fed caches residing at the leaves of multicast delivery trees. We study crucial aspects of our architecture, paying special attention to the properties of our distributed caching scheme, and investigate the feasibility of a progressive deployment of the proposed functionality over the existing Internet.