Let sources know: Enabling access tracking in a content centric context

As a promising future network architecture, Named Data Networking (NDN) enables efficient content distribution and significantly reduces the overall network traffic through its routing and caching mechanisms. On the other hand, the routing and caching features of NDN could cause a side-effect in which Content Providers (CPs) are unable to acquire the accurate number of access to their contents, since consumers can get contents directly from intermediate network devices such as routers. However, the accurate statistical information of content access is of great importance for CPs when making pricing and cache placement strategies based on content popularity, but now CPs can only assume the content's access information rather than the real data to make strategies. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to help CPs regain the access information of contents timely and efficiently. In our solution, network devices keep track of the requested content information and collect the statistics of the content access information in a self-adaptive manner. The statistical information is sent to CPs by routers when certain events are triggered, so that CPs could obtain the popularity of their contents. With the proposed scheme, CPs, in the context of NDN, based on the real popularity information of contents, can make appropriate caching and pricing strategies for the sake of better serving their business interest. Our simulation further indicates that the proposed scheme is not only lightweight but also exhibits good accuracy and low latency.