Network Architectures for Next Generation Internet Content Distribution
Jianhua He · Journal of Telecommunications System & Management · 2012
Copyright: © 2012 He J. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The existing Internet architecture has been designed for efficient communication but not for distribution. Since the commercialization of Internet by the 1990s it has achieved huge success and incorporated into virtually every aspect of modern human life. It is estimated that there are about 2.267 billion Internet users on December 31, 2011 [1]. However, with the advances of Internet technologies we are witnessing the reshaping of most traditional communications media including telephone, music, film and television by the Internet. More and more contents are distributed from content providers to many users. It is estimated a high 90% level of Internet traffic consists of data disseminated to a number of users. With high-quality content such as high definition TV to be disseminated over Internet there will be huge growth of content, which requires scalable and robust network architectures to efficiently distribute over next generation Internet. In this article we analyze several existing network architectures deployed or proposed for future content distribution. The ideas behind these designs will be highlighted and their potentials and issues will be discussed.