How can an ISP merge with a CDN?

As delivering contents has become the dominant usage of Internet, the efficient content distribution is being one of the hottest research areas in network community. In future network, it is anticipated that network entities such as routers will be equipped with in-network storage due to the trend of ever-decreasing storage cost. In this paper, we propose a novel content delivery architecture called Internet Service Provider (ISP) centric Content Delivery (iCODE) by which an ISP can provide content delivery services as well. iCODE can provide efficient content delivery services since an ISP can cache the contents in routers with storage modules considering traffic engineering and the locality of the content requests. Compared with CDN and P2P systems, iCODE can offer reduced delivery latency by placing the contents closer to end hosts, and incentives to ISPs by reducing inter-ISP traffic and allowing traffic engineering. We also discuss the technical and business issues to realize the iCODE architecture.