Content Based Addressing : The case for multiple Internet service providers
Robert J. Mort · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2012
Today's Internet usage is changing from host-to-host communication to user-to-content interaction which proves a challenge for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Repeated requests lead to transfers of large amounts of traffic containing the same content often over costly inter-ISP connections. Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) contribute to solving this issue, but do not directly address the problem. This thesis project explores how content based addressing could minimize inter-ISP traffic due to repeated requests for content by caching content within the ISP's network. We implemented CCNx 0.6.0 in a network testbed in order to simulate scenarios with multiple ISPs interconnected to each other. This testbed is used to illustrate how caching of popular content minimizes inter-ISP traffic as well as how content independence minimizes the effect of other network problems such as link failures and congestion. These tests shows that the large overhead of the CCNx implementation due to the additional headers brings a 16% performance reduction compared to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) transfers. However, these tests also shows that the cost from the inter-ISP traffic of CCNx transfers are constant regardless of the number of repeated requests, due to content caching in the ISP's network. As soon as there is more than one request for the same content there is a gain in using CCNx rather than HTTP for content transfer.