A load balancing approach for adaptive bitrate streaming in Information Centric networks

The Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm promises deconstraining the current Internet architecture by allowing clients to directly address the desired content throughout the network. For the Internet this is a further evolutionary step from the idea of a narrow-waist core that only transports requests/replies to an intelligent architecture searching for and providing content. Multi-sourcing, which is one of the core ideas of ICN, constitutes a serious challenge for prevalent Internet applications such as video streaming. In this work we show how prominent adaptive video streaming protocols can benefit from the load balancing capabilities that are native to ICN. We examine the performance of content retrieval in ICN over Ethernet in a real-world testbed showing the impact of multi-sourcing and content size variation on the content transfer times.