nCDN: CDN enhanced with NDN

Content Delivery Network (CDN) improves large scale data delivery with widely distributed data replicas; But the fundamental goal of IP is to connect two hosts. As a consequence, request routing, which selects the best server to serve the requested data, is introduced to meet the mismatch between CDN and IP. In contrast to IP, Named Data Networking (NDN) makes content the first-class citizen of the network. Its specialties, such as multicast, content multihoming, cache and content-oriented security, are designed for large scale data delivery. Due to the essential consistency between CDN and NDN, we propose Named Content Delivery Network, or nCDN, which embeds NDN into existing CDN framework to simplify the implementation and improve the efficiency. nCDN supports existing running CDN infrastructure, by setting up NDN over UDP/TCP. NDN takes charge of request routing and content delivery only; While other components of CDN, such as billing, accounting, data analysis, data management etc, remain changeless. The advantages of nCDN include: 1) As NDN's routing plane holds content distribution information, requests are routed to the best data copies straightforward. 2) NDN's stateful forwarding plane detects the network state in real time, and responses to congestion, link or node failure quickly. 3) NDN naturally supports multicast and content multihoming. Multicast eliminates identical requests, while content multihoming fully utilizes redundant resources, such as bandwidth and storage.